After weeks of rebuffing the idea that his $343 billion social media platform might have been involved in the facilitation of the spread of fake news and misinformation, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg now seems to have changed his position on the matter.
According to Vanity Fair, Zuckerberg now believes that Facebook is more than just a technology company and that it has new responsibilities. "Facebook is a new kind of platform. It's not a traditional technology company. It's not a traditional media company," the 32-year-old CEO said in a live video stream on Wednesday.
In relation to his statement, Zuckerberg deems Facebook as an organization that builds technology and although it does not write the news which people read on the social platform, it is responsible for how such information is used. He also considers his organization as more than just a platform that distributes the news because it also plays an important role in the public discourse.
Zuckerberg's new opionion comes days after Facebook started rolling out some preliminary steps to combat fake news last week. These steps are expected to work by enlisting third-party fact checkers in assessing the legitimacy of posts flagged by users.
In August, Zuckerberg gave a group of students a contrasting report. The CEO said that for a media company, there are content writers and editors, something that Facebook does not have.
"We're a technology company," USA Today quoted Zuckerberg as saying. "We build tools. We do not produce any of the content."
That is just a touch of Zuckerberg's earlier contrasting ideologies. At the Techotomy Conference 2016, the CEO expressed his thoughts on the fake news matter, saying that there was a very small amount of such content on Facebook and the allegations that the platform had anything to do with influencing the election was a crazy idea.
The distinction between tech and media is now in the limelight and Facebook seems to be at the center of it. People are having mixed thoughts on the matter with some saying that Facebook's journalistic role cannot be ignored.
Here is a video of Zuckerberg's earlier opinion: