Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said her company would present “alternative facts” to combat what she described as “misinformation” spread on Facebook’s digital platform. She offered her remarks during a Wednesday Senate Intelligence Committee hearing ostensibly examining “Russian interference in U.S. elections” in Washington, DC.
Partial transcript below [emphasis added].
SANDBERG: Finding a line between what is hate speech and what is misinformation is very, very difficult, especially if you’re dedicated to expressing free expression, and sometime free expressing is expressing things you strongly disagree with. In the case of misinformation, what we do is we refer it to third-party fact-checkers. We don’t think we should be the arbiter of what’s true what’s false, and we think that’s really important. Third-party fact-checkers then mark it as false. If it’s marked as false, we dramatically decrease the distribution on our site, we warn you if you’re about to share it, we warn you if you have shared it, and importantly, we show related articles next to that so people can see alternative facts.