Fake News and the News Feed

Abstract

Tessa Lyons was a rising star at Facebook. She had been the project manager in charge of news feed integrity for a little over a year, stationed at the front lines in the battle against misinformation and “fake news.” However, in early 2019, she faced an ethical dilemma that could define her tenure at the company and perhaps her career: whether to ban Alex Jones and the content from his platform, Infowars, from the Facebook news feed. Excerpt UVA-E-0429 Rev. Jul. 24, 2019 Fake News and the News Feed Tessa Lyons was a rising star at Facebook. She had been the project manager in charge of news feed integrity for a little over a year, stationed at the front lines in the battle against misinformation and “fake news.” However, in early 2019, she faced an ethical dilemma that could define her tenure at the company and perhaps her career: whether to ban Alex Jones and the content from his platform, Infowars, from the Facebook news feed. As she took a sip of her cold brew, Lyons knew she had many ethical and strategic considerations to ponder before she made her recommendation to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. History of Facebook and the News Feed Mark Zuckerberg first conceived of Facebook in his Harvard dorm room in 2004. His first website was called FaceMash and was constructed as a “hot or not” website to rate the attractiveness of women at Harvard. After taking down the website, Zuckerberg redesigned it as an online portal for Harvard students to connect with one another. Within one month of launch, half of Harvard's undergraduates had registered on “thefacebook.com.” By December 2005, the company, which had moved to Palo Alto, California, dropped the “the,” purchased the domain name “facebook.com,” and had six million users. As of Q2 2017, Facebook had reported over two billion users worldwide. . . .