ARTHUR GOLDSTUCK: Fake news needs a more genuine response, Facebook
Mark Zuckerberg was forced into a humiliating climbdown regarding the vicious conspiracy site Infowars, now banned from the platform.
Facebook is having a rough week. Make that a rough year. If it's not a privacy scandal, it's a security crisis. If it's not a hangover from hate speech complaints, it's a flip-flop on fake news. SA is not immune, and local users last weekend found themselves having to log on afresh to mobile apps, as Facebook tried to plug the leak in its sign-in system. This week, it was plugging holes left by the departure of the founders of photo-sharing platform Instagram. And then an outage as the service went down for a few hours. And next week? Expect more of the same. The problem for Facebook is that it has become too big not to fail, too complex to operate flawlessly. Most are small failures that don't jeopardise its survival; but add up enough of these, and eventually users rebel. The most important asset of an online service is not the platform itself, or even its user base, but rather the trust of its users. Abuse their trust too often, or for too long, and they will regard you as the en...
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