Lex Cybernetica Podcast

Fake news is not a new concept, but it has been amplified by the internet and technology ecosphere. Fake news, such as the infamous Pizzagate story, can travel halfway around the World Wide Web in first-class seats while the truth is putting on its leather journalism shoes. The proliferation – or, to load the terminology, propagation – of the black-and-white-and-read-all-over plague has a clear culprit: Facebook. To its credit, Facebook, while stubbornly insisting it’s a tech and not a media company, and whose founder Mark Zuckerberg downplayed fake news’s effect on the presidential elections, does attempt to kill fake news on its eponymous social network in various ways, including allowing users to report it, decreasing its frequency on the feed, promoting news literacy, hiring human news curators, working with fact checkers, prioritizing personal posts over news posts, prioritizing news from user trusted sources, economically disincentivizing fake news purveyors, alerting users to disputed stories, siccing