A huge part of the story seems to be around confirmation bias (people like reading stuff that supports what they already believe). While confirmation bias is a

A huge part of the story seems to be around confirmation bias (people like reading stuff that supports what they already believe). While confirmation bias is a fact of life, reading fake stories to confirm your bias is not something that anybody wants to do, regardless of how irrational the bias is. Facebook obviously doesn't want to be seen as having influenced the election so they're unwilling to say anything that admits responsibility. But Zuckerberg has shown boldness and maturity as one of the best CEOs time and again, and I'd expect them to start filtering out fake news before the next presidential election. This is not an issue that's going to go away because it's going to get worse and it's going to get a lot more attention now that everyone knows about it. A core part of Facebooks stand is that they don't want to be seen as taking editorial responsibility (they can't afford to). Part of the problem there is precisely defining 'fake news'. For example, if I am a conspiracy theorist and I write a blog about how NASA never landed a rover on Mars, should Facebook delete it? At what point does irrational writing turn to fake news? Anecdotally we know that the article that claimed an informer who reported on clintons emails was murdered was obviously false. Or that the pope didn't endorse trump. The key is to build a framework that allows a company like Facebook to flag these without being seen as editors. It doesn't sound like a problem Facebook can't solve. And it has to. There's no escaping it now because political and public opinion are both going to pressure them. And it'd be unwise to ignore them. UI wise, a clean way to do this might be to put a red banner on a corner of the article with the words 'possibly false'. So Facebook doesn't delete the article, but labels it and you can challenge it if you want. It's going to be hugely discouraging to fakers.