Barack Obama on fake news: 'We have problems' if we can't tell the difference
Summary; President Barack Obama has spoken out about fake news on Facebook and other media platforms, suggesting that it helped undermine the US political process.Since the surprise election of Donald Trump as president-elect, Facebook has battled accusations that it has failed to stem the flow of misinformation on its network and that its business model leads to users becoming divided. Obama said we live in a age with "so much active misinformation" that is "packaged very well." Fake news on the social network swayed voters in the US presidential election. That’s in spite of analysis by BuzzFeed that showed that fake news on the site outperformed real news in the run-up to polling day. Google and Facebook announced plans to go after the revenue of fake news sites, kicking the hoaxers off their ad networks in an attempt to prevent misleading the public from being profitable. Although this reduces the financial incentive to generate fake news websites, it doesn’t tackle the distribution of such content on Facebook.
[] At a Democratic party rally on 7 November, Obman denounced the “crazy conspiracy theorizing” that spreads on Facebook, creating a “dust cloud of nonsense”.
[] If you were to believe the top Google result for “final election results” on Monday, you’d think that Trump won the popular vote in the 2016 election. He did not.
[] Google’s algorithms are also susceptible to fake news, the company wants to be seen as better at tackling it than Facebook.
My Opinion: The fact that Obama is speaking this issue shows that fake news is a major problem and have effected a lot of the outer issues such as the US elections. I agree with Obama when he said that it is becoming a problem when we don't know if information online is fake or not. This on going battle is becoming a problem with both the institutions and the audiences, because it is a problem for audience to trust the institutions and its a problem for the institutions because they need to be able to contain their audience and keep their social networking popular among the audiences/
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