Facebook employees reportedly fed up with fake news
In the wake of Donald Trump's victory, a group of employees at the social network reportedly form a secret task force to battle bogus news.
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Facebook employees are reportedly unhappy with CEO Mark Zuckerberg's dismissal of fake news on the social network.
Apparently, not everyone is happy with CEO Mark Zuckerberg's assurance that fake news on Facebook didn't sway the election. Even the social network's own employees.
An unofficial task force of Facebook employees is examining the company's role in promoting fake news during the 2016 presidential race, reported BuzzFeed News on Monday. The task force is currently meeting in secret, according to multiple unnamed Facebook employees, but plans to submit a formal list of recommendations to Facebook's senior management. The group reportedly includes employees from across the company.
Facebook declined to comment.
Zuckerberg said last week that it's a "pretty crazy idea" to think his social network might have swayed the vote by letting fake news proliferate on its site. That came after numerous allegations that the fake news shared on the social network helped Donald Trump win.
"It's not a crazy idea," one unnamed employee in Facebook's engineering division told BuzzFeed News. "What's crazy is for him to come out and dismiss it like that, when he knows, and those of us at the company know, that fake news ran wild on our platform during the entire campaign season."
This comes on top of a report Monday that Facebook could have helped combat fake news with an update to its News Feed. The software update was reportedly shelved because it would have disproportionately blocked out supposed stories from right-wing news sites, and Facebook didn't want to give the impression it was politically biased.