Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg on Friday night posted a message on his Facebook page about so-called fake news and the controversy over his company’s role in carrying it to hundreds of millions of users. “The bottom line is: We take misinformation seriously,” he wrote.

Immediately adjacent to his post when I checked it, at the top of the “Sponsored” column, was a photo of Clint Eastwood and the the headline “Clint Eastwood gone at 84 – ‘In loving memory’ messages pour in from fans around the world,” plus a link to a website with the word “news” in its name. The news was, of course, entirely fake. Clint is fine.

Zuckerberg is in an impossible spot. Since the election he has been under attack based on conjecture that made-up information presented as news, mostly pro-Trump, and circulated on Facebook may have tipped the election’s outcome. This is like blaming AT&T and Verizon for the lies people tell on the phone, but of course it’s also different. Everything on Facebook runs through Facebook servers and can be analyzed by the company, which is critical to its pitch to advertisers that they can target their ads, within limits, based on users’ interests and histories.

So why can’t it stop phony news?

The answer is that the task is impossible. What is news, and what is a news organization, as distinct from what any random human chooses to say on his or her Facebook page? Any of Facebook’s billion-plus users worldwide can set up a page with a plausible-sounding newsy name and start writing any nonsense they like in a journalistic style, and any other user can like it, and then anything can happen. A New York Timescase study explains how a completely false report on anti-Trump protests in Austin, Texas, by a man with about 40 Twitter followers was shared more than 350,000 times on Facebook.

No organization could possibly monitor and confirm all such reports, as Zuckerberg realizes. “We do not want to be arbiters of truth ourselves,” he wrote in his post, “but instead rely on our community and trusted third parties.” He shouldn’t have to worry about this at all – getting in the middle of what his users say to each other is arguably the opposite of his proper role – but he’s confronting the reality that he must take some kind of action. He will likely make several changes enabling users to report false information more easily, perhaps inviting third parties to add warnings to stories that appear suspect, blocking ad revenue to repeat offenders, and other actions.

Regardless of what Zuckerberg does, business leaders must prepare for being victimized by fake news. It’s happening already. A headline at a news site called TruthFeed recently quoted PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi as telling Trump supporters to “take their business elsewhere.” Trump supporters called for a boycott, the stock fell – but the quote was fabricated. She never said it.

The words “media” and “news” have taken on strange new meanings, and we all, like Zuckerberg, have to figure out the implications for ourselves.

上周五晚，Facebook的马克·扎克伯格在他的Facebook页面发布了一篇博文，谈到了所谓的假新闻，以及公司在把它们传播给数亿用户上所扮演的角色引发的争议。他写道：“不论如何，我们会严肃地对待消息失实的问题。”

当我看到这篇博文时，旁边的“赞助”栏顶部正显示着克林特·伊斯特伍德的照片和一篇文章的标题“克林特·伊斯特伍德享年84岁——粉丝从全球各地发来‘爱的回忆’表示悼念”。当然，这是条彻底的假新闻。克林特身体好着呢。

扎克伯格处在一个困难的位置。自大选起，他就一直遭受抨击，因为各种基于猜测的捏造信息占据了新闻的页面，它们大多数是支持特朗普的，在Facebook上的流传可能也影响到了选举的结果。这就像因为有人用电话撒谎就抨击AT&T和威瑞森（Verizon）一样，不过当然这也有一些不同。Facebook上的一切内容都在公司的服务器上运行，可以被他们分析，这对他们根据用户的兴趣和访问历史定向投放广告商的广告十分重要。

那么，为什么公司阻止不了假新闻呢？

答案是，这是个不可能完成的任务。什么是新闻？什么是新闻机构？它们与任何人决定在自己的Facebook主页上说的内容有何不同？Facebook在全球有数十亿用户，其中的任何一个人都可以起个貌似真实的话题性标题，以新闻文体写些他们喜欢的胡说八道，而任何其他用户都可能给它点赞，再接下来，任何事都可能发生。《纽约时报》（New York Times）的一个案例研究，就解释了某篇关于得克萨斯州奥斯丁爆发反特朗普抗议游行的假报道是如何传播的。这篇报道的作者仅有40名Twitter粉丝，报道却被转发了超过35万次。

正如扎克伯格所意识到的，没有哪个机构可以监管和确证所有这些报道。他在推文中写道：“我们自己不想成为事实的仲裁者，而要依靠我们的社区和可以信赖的第三方。”他本不应该担心这个——处于用户彼此争论的中心完全不符合他本应扮演的角色——但是他正在面对现实：必须采取某些行动了。他可能会做出一些改变，让用户更容易举报假消息，也可能邀请第三方给那些不可信的内容加上警告标志，屏蔽那些散布假消息的惯犯等等。

无论扎克伯格决定怎么做，商业领袖都要做好被假消息坑害的准备。这种情况已经发生了。一个名叫TruthFeed的新闻网站发布了一篇消息，引用了百事公司）首席执行官卢英德的话，要与特朗普的支持者“结束业务往来”。特朗普的支持者呼吁抵制百事公司，致使公司股价下跌——然而这段话是伪造的，努伊从来没这么说过。

“媒体”和“新闻”如今有了奇怪的新含义，而我们所有人和扎克伯格一样，必须搞清楚它们对于我们的影响。（财富中文网）

译者：严匡正