Obama again hits at Facebook for spreading fake news

US President Barack Obama on Friday crticised Facebook for spreading fake news that favoured Donald Trump.

"In an age where there's so much active misinformation and it's packaged very well and it looks the same when you see it on a Facebook page or you turn on your television," Obama was quoted by The Verge as saying.

"If everything seems to be the same and no distinctions are made, then we won't know what to protect," he further said.

Buzzfeed found that top-performing fake stories performed better on Facebook than accurate stories shared by traditional media sites during the US presidential election campaign.

Critics have blamed the social networking giant Facebook for influencing the US-elections in favour of President-elect Donald Trump by circulating a "host of fake news stories about political topics.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg had declined that Facebook played a role in spreading fake news and termed this idea "crazy". To mitigate the criticism, Facebook decided to ban sites that post fake news from using its advertising network to make money.

"The capacity to disseminate misinformation, wild conspiracy theories, to paint the opposition in wildly negative light without any rebuttal, that has accelerated in ways that much more sharply polarise the electorate and make it very difficult to have a common conversation," Obama told New Yorker editor David Remnick.

--IANS

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