Interactive video lesson plan for: Why Facebook Needs to Take Responsibility for Fake News | Wesley Lowery

Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery says the social media giant isn't excused from making responsible editorial choices just because it wishes to see itself as a technology company first. Lowery's book is "They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement" (https://goo.gl/0ezeTq).

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Transcript - I think Facebook is responsible for what exists and what happens on its platform and I think that Facebook has been negligent in its responsibility to safeguarding and providing a forum in which sane and reasonable interaction happens and that hysterical and untrue interaction does not happen. What we know is that Facebook has the ability to deal with fake news. These are fake sites that they pop up. They’re being spread by specific pages and specific accounts and rather than address that Facebook has allowed millions of people to become deeply ill informed. Now there’s a question how democratic should a platform like Facebook be? If everyone wants to share a fake news article should that be allowed? Or does Facebook have some editorial control of what it allows to be propagated via its own mechanisms and its own channels. I mean I think that Facebook needs to take greater steps in these spaces because again Facebook itself has become a media publisher and it is now the platform and the canvas for chaos to be created by all of this fake information spreading so quickly without any check and balance and any responsibility being taken by the platform of sorting through what is true and what is not. Read Full Transcript Here: https://goo.gl/4yfAPc.

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