Facebook: Force For Good, Or Source Of Fake News?

As Facebook hit a milestone, recently racking up 2 billion monthly users, its executives considered how they can make the company a force for good.

While the social media giant has connected billions of people to one another, it’s also been cited  as a tool for potentially swaying voters in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Data company Fluent polled 2,700 U.S. consumers ages 18 and older online on June 29 to gauge their usage of, and attitudes toward, the largest social media platform in the world.

The data company decided to conduct the survey after seeing a pop-up on Facebook’s home screen asking users whether they believe it’s doing good for the world.

To that end, the survey found more than 80% of the country has a Facebook account, and about 4 in 10 Americans agree that Facebook is good for the world. Nearly half (47%) don’t have an opinion one way or another.

Among the survey’s other findings:

--Active Facebook users are nearly twice as likely to believe that Facebook is good for the world compared to those who don’t have an account or rarely log in.

--More than 4 in 10 Americans are confident in their ability to identify fake news articles on Facebook, and active Facebook users are the most confident in their skills to spot a fake.

--Most Americans (69%) believe that fake news stories on Facebook had at least some impact on the 2016 U.S. election outcome, while nearly a quarter believe that the impact was major.

Apart from the impact on the election, Fluent also sought to determine how people feel scrolling through friends’ posts and curated presences on social media: Doing so can sometimes make people feel jealous or annoyed. And according to the survey, nearly 20% of Americans believe that people’s Facebook posts make their friends feel less positive about them.

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