Fake News is here to stay! Read all about it!

Florida Times-Union building
Wikimedia Commons

This is the unedited version of a letter to the editor that appeared in the Florida Times-Union on January 1, 2017. I have to admit, I still get a little bang out of picking up the newspaper at the end of my driveway and seeing something I wrote in there. 

Fake news isn’t going away. The folks who consume it just love the stuff! More importantly, producers of fake news and advertisers alike are making money from it.

Facebook’s Plan to Fight Fake News

“We have a responsibility to reduce the spread of fake news on our platform,” Adam Mosseri, Facebook vice president of product development, told The Washington Post on Thursday.

Facebook is putting in a system for reporting potential fake news stories. Some of those stories will be checked out by Snopes, PolitiFact, and other fine organizations. If a story is fake, it will be labeled as such. So, essentially, there will be warning labels on fake news stories. It appears to be a step in the right direction but there are some serious questions that will need to be addressed.