Late last month, while the debate around President Obama’s decision to grant some amnesty to undocumented immigrants was happening, a story with the headline “Sarah Palin: Send Immigrants ‘Back Across Ocean’ to Mexico” appeared in many people’s Facebook News Feeds.
The story was, of course, untrue. But scores of commenters mocked Ms. Palin’s supposed geographical ignorance, seemingly unaware that it came from the satirical website the Daily Currant.
And that reaction highlights a big problem for Facebook, which has a growing ambition to become a centralized source for news and a native platform for publishers. Those goals are starting to collide with the company’s tenets as a tech-driven social network.