Facebook doesn't need to ban fake news to fight it

Mark Zuckerberg's social media site doesn't have to become a censor to help tackle false stories. It can do a lot by helping its own users with context

In the wake of the US presidential election, almost everyone agrees that misinformation is a problem. Even Mark Zuckerberg has finally said that Facebook will take it seriously. "Our goal is to connect people with the stories they find most meaningful, and we know people want accurate information," he wrote this week.

Zuckerberg's message was slightly undercut for some users by the fact that it was accompanied by adverts for fake news. Ev Williams, the co-founder of Twitter, Blogger and Medium, posted his own example a few days later: links, claiming to be from ESPN and CNN, to stories that implying that Tiger Woods had died and Donald Trump had been "disqualified", right next to the Facebook chief executive's post.