Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook Will ‘Dial Up the Intensity’ of News ‘Suppression’ Leading Up to Midterm Elections

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated recently that the company plans to “dial up the intensity” of news suppression leading towards the U.S. midterm elections.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated this week that the social media firm has plans to further crack down on fake news on the platform via “suppression” of certain news publications. BuzzFeed News reports that Zuckerberg revealed that Facebook has been gathering data on certain publications by asking consumers how they feel about certain publications and their trustworthiness.

Zuckerberg stated: “We put [that data] into the system, and it is acting as a boost or a suppression, and we’re going to dial up the intensity of that over time. We feel like we have a responsibility to further [break] down polarization and find common ground.” Zuckerberg stated that Facebook would be investing billions of dollars into human moderators to spot fake news on the platform as well as heavily investing in artificial intelligence. “We’re essentially going to be losing money on doing political ads,” stated Zuckerberg.

Facebook claims to have successfully prevented the spread of fake news on their platform during elections in both France and Alabama. “We deployed AI tools that have taken down tens of thousands of accounts,” said Zuckerberg discussing the company’s role in those elections. With the 2018 midterm elections set to take place in November of this year, much focus will be placed on Facebook and their actions during the election.

Facebook met with a number of publications following their F8 conference in efforts to discuss the issue of fake news, it has yet to be reported however if any conservative publications were present at this meeting. BuzzFeed News reports that the publications present at the interview were: BuzzFeed News, the Information, Quartz, the New York Times, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, NBC, Recode, Univision, Barron’s, the Daily Beast, the Economist, HuffPost, Insider, the Atlantic, the New York Post, and others.