Facebook and Google have a “fake news” problem. Other people invent some sort of nonsense and scam social media and search engines into promoting it.

It was particularly evident late in the presidential campaign. “You can text your vote and avoid the lines!” ‘’Trump wins popular vote!” ‘’Pope Francis endorses Trump!”

All three were outright lies. But Facebook’s News Feed and Trending Topics heavily promoted the first and third of them leading up to Election Day, and Google on Sunday had the second as its top result for “final election count.”

By Tuesday both operations had announced that they would cut off the purveyors of such phonies from their ad networks. That’s good, but not good enough.

Facebook and Google each insist that they are tech companies, not media companies, that they are merely conduits of content. They don’t want the responsibility of making editorial decisions. “Identifying the ‘truth’ is complicated,” complains Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder and CEO. (Tell us about it.)

And yet that editorial responsibility is there. They choose, through their algorithms, what content individual users will see. And their passivity on ensuring the quality and accuracy of that content allows the hoaxers and con artists to flourish.

Zuckerberg is particularly adamant on the subject, even to the point of undercutting the purported value of his site. He insisted last week that fake news “surely had no impact” on the election.

Well. Facebook crows about its ability to convince people to buy products, play games and even to vote. But it lacks any influence on how its users vote? One of those propositions contradicts the other.

We said here some weeks ago, when Facebook first banned a famous war photo from the site and then backed down, that we doubt that algorithms could replace the nuanced thinking of human editors. This latest example further supports that idea.

Yes, users shouldn’t believe everything they see “on the internet.” Yes, those who bought the “text your vote” scam are the epitome of low-information voters. But if Facebook and Google can target clickbait and label satire, they can do more to weed out the fakes as well.

— Mankato Free Press, Nov. 16