Facebook pledges to clear News Feed of misinformation, again

Facebook is promising yet again to tackle the spread of misinformation in your News Feed.

"We value authentic communication, and hear consistently from those who use Facebook that they prefer not to see misinformation," Adam Mosseri, the vice president of product management, said in a statement to TechCrunch Thursday following widespread criticism of he platform's performance as news conduit during the election.

It remains unclear what "authentic communication" means, or why Facebook seems to acknowledge that this is a problem only because its users say "they prefer not to see misinformation" much in the same way that you might prefer not to eat a bologna sandwich covered in sand.

A spokesperson for Facebook referred Mashable to the company's "News Feed Values" page, which defines "authentic stories" as "the ones that resonate most."

Here's the full statement, as published on TechCrunch, with some emphasis added:

We take misinformation on Facebook very seriously. We value authentic communication, and hear consistently from those who use Facebook that they prefer not to see misinformation. In Newsfeed we use various signals based on community feedback to determine which posts are likely to contain inaccurate information, and reduce their distribution. In Trending we look at a variety of signals to help make sure the topics being shown are reflective of real-world events, and take additional steps to prevent false or misleading content from appearing. Despite these efforts we understand there’s so much more we need to do, and that is why it’s important that we keep improving our ability to detect misinformation. We’re committed to continuing to work on this issue and improve the experiences on our platform.

Facebook says it identifies inaccurate information based on "community feedback," but it's hard to tell what that really means. The social network allows any user to report a piece of content as "false news." To do so, you simply tap an arrow above a story you don't like or perceive to be inaccurate, press "report post," select "I think it shouldn't be on Facebook," then check "It's a false news story."

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Given that false information has repeatedly circulated on the social network this election season, it's unclear to what extent that reporting tool is helpful or even being used. And while Facebook says it takes steps to prevent "false or misleading content from appearing" in its Trending topics, several fake stories have done just that over the past few months.

So as Mosseri concedes, there's a lot of work to be done, and we applaud Facebook's pledge to do it.

What's slightly worrisome is that this is far from the first time Facebook has pledged to clean up its News Feed.

In August 2014, Facebook said it would combat misleading clickbait:

Today we’re announcing some improvements to News Feed to help people find the posts and links from publishers that are most interesting and relevant, and to continue to weed out stories that people frequently tell us are spammy and that they don’t want to see.

In January 2015, the social network acknowledged, as it did Thursday, that hoaxes are an issue:

We’ve heard from people that they want to see fewer stories that are hoaxes, or misleading news. Today’s update to News Feed reduces the distribution of posts that people have reported as hoaxes and adds an annotation to posts that have received many of these types of reports to warn others on Facebook.

In December 2015, it said so it again:

One example of a type of viral post that people report they don’t enjoy seeing in their News Feed are hoaxes. If there is a viral story about a hoax, it can get a lot of reshares and comments, which would normally help us infer it might be an interesting story. However, we’ve heard feedback that people don’t want to see these stories as much as other posts in their News Feed.

And in August 2016, Facebook referenced the problem once more:

One of our News Feed values is to have authentic communication on our platform. People have told us they like seeing authentic stories the most. That’s why we work hard to understand what type of stories and posts people consider genuine, so we can show more of them in News Feed. We also work to understand what kinds of stories people find misleading and spammy to help make sure people see those less.

So, there you have it. Hoaxes and spam are problems on Facebook and the company, once again, is working on it.

UPDATE: Nov. 10, 2016, 2:38 p.m. EST This article has been updated with additional information from Facebook.