Technical solutions to the problem are relatively cheap, but the root of the problem is much deeper, involving social media's tendency to function as a non-fact-checked echo chamber. Facebook is just the most notable platform plagued by the issue.

In the past, Facebook had a partial solution-- human editors who would curate news stories and try to eliminate fake news from trending. I recently met one of these editors while traveling, and we had some long discussions about the issue. Facebook fired the team of human editors and replaced them with an automated solution. That decision was motivated based on a combination of factors related to expenses and liability which is obscured by Facebook's opaque internal hierarchy.

Really addressing the problem will take significant investment by platforms like Facebook to research the problem and implement robust technical solutions. But these platforms have rigid internal hierarchies and internal feedback loops that prevent that from happening. For platforms to invest in solving this problem, continued, strategic pressure needs to come from the outside.

(As it is, there is already pressure from the outside, but Facebook has responded by basically trying to cover their own ass: http://gizmodo.com/facebooks-fight-against-fake-news-was-und...)

The ex-Facebook curator I spoke with attempted to change Facebook's culture from the inside and found it impossible. Her recommendation is that credible journalism organizations from varying ideological backgrounds (everything from CNN, to Fox News to the New York Times) need to demand that Facebook invest in a solution, by refusing to syndicate their content through Facebook's platform unless Facebook does something to prevent credible, fact-checked content from getting shouted over by sensational fake news.

Journalism organizations are already working on this, but readers can help by writing letters to the lead editors of these organizations urging them to put this kind of pressure on Facebook. People with technical skills can help by investing time and energy improving competing news-syndication platforms (Twitter, Reddit, RSS, Steemit, etc).

I've got my own elaborate technical solution to Facebook's fact-void-echo-chamber problem that involves a combination of labels, like these students created, and algorithms that recommend related stories from sources across ideological divides. But unless leading social media platforms are ready to invest in these kinds of solutions, their impact on the problem will be negligible.

Anyway, these are all just my thoughts after listening to many people talk about the issue. If anyone reading this is a part of the team that's investing energy into getting this problem solved, I'd love to help. I'm currently a JS/React dev and also willing to shift my career to marketing, UI/UX, etc. Please reach out to me: http://josiahsprague.com