Facebook may hire digital journalists, news publishers to curb fake news

San Francisco, April 2 

In order to better tackle fake news and improve quality of content on its platform, Facebook might hire a new generation of digital-era journalists and news publishers.

In a discussion with Mathias Dopfner, CEO of Europe's largest publisher Axel Springer, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday talked over how the platform should create more high-quality news for its over 2 billion users globally.

"I don't know how many fake accounts you think Facebook has, but it seems to be quite a big amount. Some people are saying 700 million. I have no clue, but that has to be dealt with as a very serious problem," said the 34-year-old CEO.

"We have to make a business in order to finance investigative journalists and correspondents, and big foreign networks, they cannot afford to do that for free," he added.

Zuckerberg said he would focus on making sure what makes the offering and it's structuring on Facebook attractive for the hundreds of thousands of journalists, bloggers, digital native publishers, legacy publishers, that they are attracted to put their best content on that platform.

"We're not going to have journalists making news. What we want to do is make sure that this is a product that can get people high-quality news," said the Facebook co-founder.

Facebook could have a direct relationship with publishers in order to make sure that the content is really high-quality.

"There's a whole set of questions around how do we build a service that is contributing to high-quality journalism through increasing monitorisation," said the American tech entrepreneur.

The Menlo Park-based online social media and social networking service company is battling the menace of fake news and misinformation on its platform, especially during election times, including in India where it has removed thousands of fake accounts, groups and pages linked with political parties. — IANS