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> because blocking this stuff would amount to censorship

Facebook fired its "news curators" in response to criticism of it suppressing "news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential 'trending' news section" [1]. This happened in May of last year.

[1] http://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-supp...

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Right, in an effort not to appear as though they are editorializing legitimate news stories for one side or the other via what appears in the trending news section, they threw the baby out with the bath water. Fake news is not legitimate news. It's a form of spam. They did nothing to remove this spam once they got rid of the human editors. So the trending news section went from left leaning legitimate news stories under human editors to a bunch of spam. Now they want to use automated methods to police your private messages when they couldn't be bothered to figure out an automated method to remove spam from their trending news section when it really mattered.

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