But put me among the skeptics who doubt they will solve the larger problem of fake news. Just last week Zuckerburg questioned the need to remove a holocaust denier from the system.

Not Barnum, but a distorted bit of something written by H. L. Mencken. His words were

“No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”

It is relevant thought, as he was writing on the “tabloid journalism” of the day. He viewed the tabloid papers as

geared toward uneducated readers, including those (Mencken described as) “near-illiterates.”

I doubt that much can be done about it in the U.S. because many people like it, there is a lot of money being made because of it, and just about anyone with a political or social agenda needs it.

I think you are condensing the use of FB a bit too much. Most people do not have feeds that are swarming with the likes of nazis, alex jones, “patriots”, white supremacists, etc. There is a bit of walling off — you need to seek them out. The question FB is “wrestling” with is whether those sources should be there at all. As I mentioned above, the “get rid of anyone who threatens or harms others” clearly doesn’t go far enough, but coming up with a method that will scale is going to be hard (I may be giving FB and is engineers too much credit here, but I do think they are working on it). They had a huge issue with sorting out how do deal with news vs “fake news”, and at one point tried a hammer that included opinion pieces as political advertising.

Two final points: They’ll get hit hard from morons who think they are “censoring free speech” — the usual people who think companies saying “you can’t use our platform” means a subject will never be able to get a message out elsewhere, and (second) even though I believe they are working on this, I’m not optimistic they’ll get it right on the first try: the “solution” they proposed for dealing with people posting compromising pictures of people without consent was mind-bogging in its stupidity, so they don’t have a good track record of fixing things.

I doubt that much can be done about it in the U.S. because many people like it, there is a lot of money being made because of it, and just about anyone with a political or social agenda needs it. Oh yeah, and the GOP is in power now.

Just out of curiosity, how about having a bunch of tea partyish conservative groups deciding what speech is acceptable and what should be censored? Or groups like the CIA and whatever the KGB is now? What about censorship based on lack of popularity? Any personal likes or dislikes in these cases?

Nothing relevant here at all mikeN — just another attempt by you to change the subject.

I don’t want a bunch of liberal groups deciding what speech is acceptable and what should be censored.

It’s a very good thing your asinine comment isn’t what is being considered.

It’s also the case that this will require adjusting their core algorithms: they are trained to promote posts and comments that get a large number of likes quickly, which is exactly what hot topics of any flavor do, so they need some measurable way of distinguishing between crap from (info wars, fox, “Patriot” groups, …) and fact based material.

First though, there needs to be a commitment to do this, and I haven’t seen one.