Facebook already exercises this power by deciding how to determine what users "want" to see, i.e., what Facebook thinks users want to see.
I'm not sure how you could claim that individual Facebook users have much power at all. What they see is totally determined by the platform.
We need to know the truth about facts. Only then can we make useful political decisions about those facts.
Facebook fact checking materials before displaying them is fundamentally political, if only because the decision of filtering strategy is a political choice.
That has political implications because everything does. But evaluating content based on those implications, rather than on the actual facts, is a categorical error.
We label fiction and nonfiction in libraries, book stores, movies, magazines, etc--basically every other medium for accessing content. Why not Facebook too?
"The Pope endorses Trump" would be labeled as fiction. But what about "The Pope endorses [some of] Trump's views"? Or "The Pope is a bigger fan of Trump than you think"?
In fact, they do the opposite: they promote it to millions of people. Or more accurately, they permit their software to do so. And they claim they have no responsibility, even though they built the entire thing.
I saw the BS News extension it checks each link for citing known fake news sites in their article.
It is not practical as I keep seeing new fake news sites popping up from nowhere. Just register a domain, install Wordpress, write some articles and then pay for advertising on Facebook.
Fake news sites got Trump elected by saying false things like the Pope supports him. It is serious when people only use Facebook as their only news site and read and believe without checking the facts first.
If I were to make a fake news site detector I'd have it search Snopes and Politifact and others to see if it has been already reported as false.
Basically the way it ends up is a new way to censor the news using AI.
Suppose instead of a black list of sites they use a white list of trusted sites? Then block any new sites until they can verify them as trusted?
Decisions with political implications are not the same thing as political decisions. Huge categorical difference, in fact.
How does Facebook determine what facts
are without politics?
For example, if an article states that Colorado pot shops accept food stamps [1] or that Dearborn in Michigan follows Sharia law [2] perhaps Facebook could determine those articles are satirical because they aren't true?
[1] http://www.denverpost.com/2014/01/14/fake-report-about-color... [2] http://nationalreport.net/city-michigan-first-fully-implemen...
You just moved words around, but my original question is still there: how do you without any political decisions determine what is true?
There is no single method for determining truth, thus which for a collective to use is fundamentally a political choice.
You and a sibling comment seem to be forgetting that we need to decide how we're going to determine truth before we go about doing it. In fact, you assume Facebook knows a fact (that potshops dont accept foodstamps), but how does Facebook know that is a fact or not?
They may need to make things more obvious.
Facts are facts. The pope did not endorse Donald Trump. That is a fact.
If Facebook makes a choice of method, it's fundamentally political, as all group choices are.
Thus, Facebook can't escape the political nature of that task: epistemology requires a philosophical position, and a philosophocal position being adopted is a choice (for an organization), and all group decisions are inherently political.