For a lot of people who are attracted to fake news, this flag might start to look like validation. I mean, come on: People who buy actual conspiracy theories aren’t going to be swayed by the fact that Facebook — or The Washington Post, for that matter — say it’s not true that Mossad reptilians live in Ivanka Trump’s brain. If anything, it might encourage them to trust such stories more, out of rebellion.
But perhaps more importantly, these “fact-checkers” simply can’t be trusted to do the job Facebook wants them to do.
Mark Zuckerberg took pains to explain that he only wants to go after “clear hoaxes” and not target anything in the “gray area” of opinion. That’s incredibly hard to do consistently well.
Fake news is attractive because public trust in the media has plummeted. Public trust in the media has plummeted in large part because many organizations suffer from worldview biases that tend to taint their coverage.
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