Facebook's Gaping Loophole in Fight Against Fake News

One of the biggest flaws within today's social media influence is misinformation, or as some like to call it, fake news. In recent years, it has become common knowledge not to believe everything you read on social media, especially on Facebook. Facebook has become notorious for displaying misinformation that is portrayed in a way that appears to be distributed by a credible source. Over the years, Facebook has taken action to stop the spreading of this fake news throughout their platform by attempting to shut down the accounts responsible. Studies have proven that these steps the Facebook team has taken have in fact been working...However, a loophole has been discovered that shows this company has a lot of work to do in order to stop this fake news epidemic completely. "Mashable has learned of glitch in Facebook Groups that allow Facebook Pages to easily create and spread fake news and misinformation via a feature that was previously shut down 2 years ago: editable link previews." However in June of 2017, Facebook announced that they were disposing of the ability to edit link previews in an effort to stop the flow of fake news on their site. A recent viewer noticed a glitch in the system that still allows users to edit these links, therefore obtaining the ability to showcase more fake news to the world. This article published by Mashable.com stood out to me for a few reasons. First of all, why were links  editable in the first place. This feature is a recipe for disaster to begin with. Second, I find it interesting that Facebook couldn't figure out how to disable this feature, being one of the most popular social media platforms in the world. Something just isn't adding up here. This leads me to believe that Facebook wants to keep this feature, because it draws attention to the feed on a daily basis, despite giving the website a bad reputation.

https://mashable.com/article/facebook-loophole-fake-news-link-preview/

https://thenextweb.com/facebook/2018/07/31/facebook-uncovers-yet-another-fake-news-campaign/