【1979 Archives】

Another day979 Archives another attempt by Facebook at saving face in light of that whole "fake news on Facebook is ruining news" thing. And this time, to a room full of journalists!

On Thursday, Patrick Walker of Facebook's media partnerships for Europe apologized for mistakes Facebook made handling the fake news problem, and outlined the social network's commitment to combatting it at the NewsXchange Conference in Copenhagen. Except, this time, the room included more than 500 journalists—the very people whose work is being devalued by the proliferation of fake news.

Facebook outlined seven principles within its plan to address fake news. CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared these steps earlier this month in a post on the platform which temporarily disappeared thanks to what Facebook claimed was a glitch.

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These principles are: stronger detection, easy reporting, third party verification, warnings, related articles quality, disruption fake news economics and listening.

Facebook has always maintained that it's not a media company. It's also always faced heat from journalists for making that claim while moving in an institutional direction that indicates the exact opposite. For example: the company wasn't exactly transparent about the curation behind its "Trending Topics," and then, subsequently firing human curators after a Gizmodo report exposed the process. One former Facebook employee accused the company of suppressing conservative news.

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While Facebook has said it is taking responsibility and action to combat fake news, the company continues to emphasize the role of the community and also cautioned that it is not the internet's sole outlet of expression.

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Walker's presentation followed one by Espen Egil Hansen, the editor-in-chief of Afterposten, Norway's biggest newspaper. Hansen had published an open letter to Zuckerberg after the company forced him to remove a documentary photograph from the Vietnam war.

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