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Hrak Kosbekian's Thoughts About Fake News On Facebook

Our distance learner Hrak Kosbekian lives in Beirut, Lebanon. I think his ideas in his essay on the topic "Fake News on Facebook" are worth reading. 

Fake news problem on Facebook.

The internet can be described as a world hub, where people can see and talk to each other from all 6 continents of Earth. A Harvard student named Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook so that Harvard students could connect with one another. As time passed, more people started signing in, and in 2005 Facebook reported that they had already surpassed the 6 million users mark.

 Facebook essentially supports the principle which is the freedom of speech. Users can express themselves either with texts or images, about themselves, or anything that could come to mind.

News outlets switched from ordinary newspapers to digital websites, where they could save a lot of money and time, by not needing papers to distribute news, and to deliver them instantly through the web, to everyone with access to the internet.

 Facebook becamea news hub. Big companies started their own pages, gained a lot of audience, and generally found success in this new digital world. However, recent research study shows that Facebook holds the most untrustworthy news outlets out of all social media, including Google, Twitter, and Gmail by a large margin. Fake news can sometimes have a large amount of impact, for example on voting decisions in the political world.

 As mentioned earlier, Facebook supports the principle which is the Freedom of speech but does not support misinformation, and “tries” to fight against them, them meaning 2.85 billion people. Misinformation will always exist, and companies like Facebook cannot control all of the publicized news, and I believe only the readers/users can take up a fight against misinformation.