Facebook had a tool to weed out fake news circulating on the social network this year but declined to deploy it for fear of offending conservatives, a report said Monday reports AFP.
The report by the online news site Gizmodo comes with Facebook under fire for allowing hoaxes and misinformation to go viral and—according to some critics—boost the efforts of Republican Donald Trump in his successful presidential run.
Facebook denied the report. Gizmodo, citing unnamed sources said to be knowledgeable about Facebook’s decision-making, said the tool was shelved after a controversy over reports saying the social network suppressed some conservative voices in its “trending topics” earlier this year. “They absolutely have the tools to shut down fake news,” Gizmodo quoted one source as saying. “There was a lot of fear about upsetting conservatives after (the uproar over) trending topics.”
A Facebook statement said that the claims made in the article were “not true.”
“We did not build and withhold any News Feed changes based on their potential impact on any one political party,” the statement from Facebook said.
“We always work to make News Feed more meaningful and informative, and that includes examining the quality and accuracy of items shared, such as clickbait, spam and hoaxes.”
Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg has rejected the idea that bogus stories shared at the social network paved a path of victory for Trump.“The idea that fake news on Facebook, which is a very small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way I think is a pretty crazy idea,” Zuckerberg said during an on-stage chat at Technonomy, a technology trends conference in California.