Facebook staff set-up unofficial task force to combat fake news

Facebook staff have created an unofficial task force dedicated to questioning the circulation of fake news on the site in the run up to US President Trump’s victory.

Buzzfeed News reports that "more than dozens" of Facebook employees have joined forces, and have already rebutted a statement made by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at a conference last week that the argument that fake news on Facebook affected the election was “a pretty crazy idea.”

A Facebook employee who works in the social network’s engineering division said: “It’s not a crazy idea. What’s crazy is for him to come out and dismiss it like that, when he knows, and those of us at the company know, that fake news ran wild on our platform during the entire campaign season.”

However, the scrutiny over Facebook’s treatment of editorial content has been intensifying for months, The Guardian reports, indicating the social media site’s power and influence to its over 150 million American users.