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Facebook
Considering Feature Update To Prevent Spread Of Misinformation
Posted: 07/13/2015 8:02 pm EDT
Many of Facebook's 1.44 billion users turn to the social network for their news,
but there's a little quirk with how it handles headlines.
A feature has long existed on the social media platform that allows
individuals to completely alter the text of an article's headline and
sub-headline when posting it onto their profile or News Feed.
Reached for comment, a spokeswoman for Facebook told The
Huffington Post that the feature was introduced in 2011 to allow individuals to
fix fields that did not display correctly. At the time, Facebook didn't always
produce the correct headlines, sub-headlines or images when a link was posted,
so a user needed to be able to edit them.
But there's a pretty major downside. Because anyone can
edit a headline, it's easy to misrepresent the news and a publication's intent.
That means confusion or, worse, the spread of false information.
Asked about the potential for headlines to be distorted,
the company told HuffPost Monday that an update to this feature may be coming.
"We’ve improved our automatic rendering technology
so that most of the time, the link sharing preview does generate a title and
description that accurately reflect what people want to share," a
spokeswoman said.
"As a result, we’re considering changing this
feature to better align with how people share links today and to help ensure
that publishers’ content is not misrepresented,” she continued.
Here's why that matters. As of now, it's painfully easy
to create the impression that news organizations are reporting false stories:
One could even make it seem like The New York Times has
issued a correction on its polarizing story about pea guacamole:
It's easy to be playful, but sometimes there are some
not-so-great consequences.
Here's a real-world example: Two weeks ago, comedian D.L.
Hughley, a celebrity who often appears on news programs to offer political commentary,
shared a HuffPost article about Bristol Palin's recent pregnancy announcement.
But, somewhere along the line, someone had completely changed the headline and
sub-headline to make the article seem like it was about the race of the
baby's father.
HuffPost's original headline, "Bristol Palin
Announces She's Pregnant," was changed to "Bristol Palin Announces
She's Pregnant By A Black Man." There's a weak joke added in the
sub-headline about Palin being unable to tell black men apart and assuming the
father's name is "DeShawn."
HuffPost's actual story doesn't mention race in any way
and doesn't speculate about the identity of the father. To be clear, actually
clicking on the false headline still brings you to the real article, but the
problem is that many people won't care to do so.
A representative for Hughley told HuffPost that he simply
shared the bogus version of the article's headline after seeing it in his News
Feed.
We were able to confirm that this particular edit of the
article had been posted to Facebook by a separate page on June 26, a few day
prior to Hughley's "share." It seems that page eventually deleted its
post, but the damage had been done: The bogus version of the link was shared
over 8,800 times from Hughley's page. (The post was still up on Hughley's page,
as of Monday evening.)
That's concerning because it gives fuel to racist jerks,
for one thing:
It also prompts people who don't know any better to
spread misinformation.
The article about Palin's pregnancy isn't likely to
incite a nuclear war, but it contains information about a public figure who
could, for example, follow in her mother's footsteps and run for office one
day. The doctored version of the article reached thousands upon thousands of
people and untold numbers of people who are friends with those
individuals who shared it.
While Facebook considers a fix, there's a lesson to be
learned: Skepticism, as ever, should prevail when you glean information from
your News Feed, as a huge number of people do every week.
And please: Be kind when messing with headlines.
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