Facebook, the fake news and Stephen King

The coronavirus is causing troubles not only for the ramping epidemic on the population, now even the companies are dealing with the first effects of the emergency. But that’s not enough, the stress created by the virus is spreading on internet: between fake news and informatic virus now there is a turmoil even on the web.

Facebook and the fake news

A strong stance is the Facebook one, that demonstrates how the laws that regulate the contents are always evolving. Even if Zuckerberg strongly claims that he doesn’t want to be an editor that decides what can be posted or what not on his social, the social trend is getting ever closer to the censor one.

In this case though the decision to act is anyway shareable. In Menlo Park they worked to remove all the fake or misleading contents from Facebook and Instagram.

Usually the management of the fake news is not this one: they firstly check the reports gave by the users or the news found by external Fact Checker. These, once approved, aren’t removed, but depowered in their exposition.

Mainly because the difference between fake news, satire and personal opinion is really thin, so Facebook reduces their spreading but don’t censure them.

In this case instead they removed from Facebook, for example, the posts that encourage to drink bleach to cure the coronavirus and they removed the dangerous hashtag on Instagram.

Stephen King gives up with Facebook

Moreover if a men like Stephen King gives up with Facebook right because of the fake news, we must do something. Stephen King, successful american writer, famous for writing more than fifty romances, many of which became even famous movies, sure doesn’t mind to say what he thinks.

So he announced in a Tweet his decision. Underpointing how now the fake news circulate without control, auto increasing, and how the users don’t have any instrument to defend themselves.

Stephen  King on the social had more than 5,6 million of followers and he says on Twitter:

I leave Facebook, I’m not feeling confortable with the flow of fake informations that are used in the political advertising, and I don’t rely the Facebook skills to protect the users’ privacy. Let’s follow me on Twitter (me, and Molly, the Wicked), if you want.

For who doesn’t know it “Molly, the Wicked” is his dog. In this specific case King was talking about the stance of Facebook about the payed posts of the politician. Mark Zuckerberg infact few days before announced that he was going on with not doing fact-checking about the declarations of the politicians. On Twitter instead this kind of post are completely banned.

Another note that alarmed King, was the claim of Zuckerberg about the microtargeting: practical for who the subscription announcements are showed to a user by focusing on the personal informations saved on their own profile.

The informatic virus “coronavirus”

But let’s come back to the coronavirus lost between the fake news we will look for informations on internet. But where there are many researches about the same topic, often there is someone that takes advantages of it and that hides informatic virus for the soccer world cup, Games of Thrones and Trump.

The virus are hidden in normal files PDF, MP4 or docx, that the user downloads with the hope to have adding informations about a specific topic. By doing that though he download a trojan or a worm.

Kaspersky until now found “only” 10 about the coronavirus, but they might increase, because the epidemic is ongoing. Be careful so to download something while you are trying to avoid a fake news.

This post is also available in: Italiano