According to this article The Sun was one of the biggest spenders among pro-Brexit campaigners. The paper’s publisher, News Group Newspapers, is recorded as having spent £96,898 on a pull-out poster calling for readers to vote to leave, published in the paper days before the referendum. The spending by Remain campaigners however, declared on Tuesday, is far greater than spent by Leave campaigners.
- The Sun spent more than Economists For Brexit (£54,000)
- Remainers spent £2,917,667
- Leave campaigners spent £1,901,815.
I am not surprised by these statistics as the Sun is known to be a left wing tabloid, hence the reason they have gone this far to fund their campaign. However, it does go to show that no matter how much you spend (remainers), it all depends on the newspapers that consumers are most likely to read, which is the cheaper newspapers such as the Sun.
This article discusses the issue of "fake news" that is constantly being circulated around Facebook, and how this issue should be tackled. Most of the solutions fall into three general categories of either the hiring of human editors; crowdsourcing, and technological or algorithmic solutions. One solution could be human editors acting as gatekeepers of the news on Facebook where they will have to assess a news article before it enters the news stream. However, hiring people – especially the number needed to deal with Facebook’s volume of content – is expensive, and it may be hard for them to act quickly and humans are also partial to subjectivity. Another approach could be improving the algorithmic or machine learning currently favored by Facebook, which led to the firing of their human trending news team earlier in 2016. But the current systems are failing to identify and downgrade hoax news or distinguish satire from real stories. Another solution could be verification, similar to Twitter’s “blue tick” system. verification would mean that a news organization would have to apply to be verified and be proved to be a credible news source so that stories would be published with a “verified” flag.
- Facebook has been slow to admit it has a problem with misinformation on its news feed, which is seen by 1.18 billion people every day.
I personally believe that the fake news problem is getting out of hand, and that there are many possible solutions but they need to be tailored to fit the expenses needed of Facebook and also the quality desired to satisfy consumers.
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