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<\/a>People are silhouetted as they pose in front of a screen projected with a Facebook logo. (Dado Ruvic\/Reuters)<\/p><\/div>\n
A week after trying to reassure the public<\/a> that\u00a0it was \u201cextremely unlikely hoaxes changed the outcome of this election,\u201d Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg outlined several\u00a0ways the company might try to stop the spread of\u00a0fake news on the platform in the future.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve been working on this problem for a long time and we take this responsibility seriously. We\u2019ve made significant progress, but there is more work to be done,\u201d Zuckerberg wrote in a Friday night post on his own Facebook page<\/a>. He then named seven approaches the company was considering to address the issue, including warning labels on false stories, easier user reporting methods and the integration of third-party verification.<\/p>\n [Facebook fake-news writer: \u2018I think Donald Trump is in the White House because of me\u2019<\/a>]<\/i><\/p>\n \u201cThe problems here are complex, both technically and philosophically,\u201d he cautioned, repeating the company\u2019s long-standing aversion to becoming the \u201carbiters of truth\u201d \u2014 instead preferring to rely on third parties and users to make those distinctions.<\/p>\n \u201cWe need to be careful not to discourage sharing of opinions or mistakenly restricting accurate content,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n While none of the listed ideas are particularly specific, Zuckerberg\u2019s post\u00a0does provide more details on the company\u2019s thinking about the problem of fake news.<\/p>\n Facebook\u2019s concern with fake news predates the 2016 elections.\u00a0Hoaxes have long plagued<\/a> the site\u2019s algorithms, which incentivize the creation of content that its users would like to share, true or not.<\/p>\n But fake news \u2014 and specifically, Facebook\u2019s role in spreading it \u2014 became a story of wide interest just after the elections, when critics accused the platform of influencing voters by allowing political hoaxes to regularly go viral \u2014 particularly those favorable to President-elect Donald Trump.\u00a0Zuckerberg has strongly denied that this was true<\/a>,\u00a0saying last week that the idea that Facebook influenced the elections in this way is \u201cpretty crazy,\u201d and that fake news\u00a0\u201csurely had no impact\u201d on the outcome.<\/p>\n Zuckerberg did not contradict this\u00a0denial Friday, but his post reflects Facebook\u2019s growing acknowledgment that it\u2019s going to have to do a lot more about the plague of hoaxes and fake stories on the platform. On Monday, Facebook announced it was going to crack down on fake news sites that use its ad services to profit off hoaxes.<\/p>\n