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"Facebook can't get its story straight on fake news," said Alfred Ng and Joan Solsman at CNET. The social media giant hosted a group of tech journalists at its Manhattan offices last week, with the aim of showcasing its efforts to fight misinformation. But the company's commitment to that battle is far from clear. When asked how the platform could claim to be tackling fake news while simultaneously allowing the fringe-right conspiracy site Infowars to operate a page with nearly 1 million followers, Facebook News Feed head John Hegeman replied that Infowars hadn't actually broken Facebook's rules. The company does ban outlets that promote violence and hate speech, he explained, but "just being false" doesn't violate Facebook's standards. Facebook, he added, is a place for different publishers with "different points of view." But Infowars doesn't simply produce "different points of view," said Oliver Darcy at CNN. It deliberately spreads false information: It has suggested that the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax staged by child actors and that NASA is running a child sex slave colony on Mars. Facebook later clarified that it does down-rank demonstrably false content, so that those posts won't appear at the top of news feeds, but will not interfere with users' "free expression."
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