In 2016, following the shock November 2016 US election results, Mark Zuckerberg claimed: ‘Of all the content on Facebook, more than 99 per cent of what people see is authentic’.
He also cautioned that the company should not rush into fact-checking.
But Zuckerberg soon came under fire after it emerged fake news had helped sway the election results.
In response, the company rolled out a ‘Disputed’ flagging system that it announced in a December 2016 post.
The system meant users were responsible for flagging items that they believed were fake, rather than the company.
In April 2017, Facebook suggested the system had been a success.
It said that ‘overall false news has decreased on Facebook’ – but did not provide any proof.
‘It’s hard for us to measure because we can’t read everything that gets posted’, it said.
But it soon emerged that Facebook was not providing the full story.
In July 2017, Oxford researchers found that ‘computational propaganda is one of the most powerful tools against democracy,’ and Facebook was playing a major role in spreading fake news.
In response, Facebook said it would ban pages that post hoax stories from being allowed to advertise in August 2017.
In September, Facebook finally admitted during congressional questioning that a Russian propaganda mill had placed adverts on Facebook to sway voters around the 2016 campaign.
In December 2017, Facebook admitted that its flagging system for fake news was a failure.
Since then, it has used third-party fact-checkers to identify hoaxes, and then given such stories less prominence in the Facebook News Feed when people share links to them.
In January, Zuckerberg said Facebook would prioritise ‘trustworthy’ news by using member surveys to identify high-quality outlets.
Facebook has now quietly begun ‘fact-checking’ photos and videos to reduce fake news stories. However, the details of how it is doing this remain unclear.