The recent debate over fake news and how to tackle them caught the attention of global media last week, with everyone ranging from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to US President Barack Obama weighing in on the issue.

“Freedom of expression is a bedrock of democracy, but its irresponsible exercise can distort and destabilise our politics. That reality is now at the center of attention in the social media world as Facebook and others confront questions about their role in spreading fake news and false information before and after the presidential campaign. The social media companies must not duck this issue. It goes to the heart of an open society, and also is the key to their own credibility and survival,” said the Washington Post.

Explaining the rise of the phenomenon, the paper said: “It wasn’t all that long ago that the Internet was a wild west, where information ran free. As Facebook, Google and Twitter grew, they celebrated this as a virtue, insisting they were technology companies built on algorithms and not news media outlets. But on the road to becoming true global giants, Facebook and the others took on enormous new power to shape the information that people consume.”

Appealing to the tech giants to make a distinction between personal posts, “which are best left largely unfettered, and the news feed posts that can quickly go viral, accelerated by algorithms that respond to user engagement,” the paper said: “Fake news is dangerous mischief and takes advantage of the fact that social media generally rely on rapid-fire algorithms and not deliberate human editing. The social media services must adjust to the reality that they now are news media outlets to some extent; that means relying more on human editors to weed out the fake news.”

The Chicago Sun Times put the issue in the context of the just-concluded US presidential election and said: “To our thinking, it’s a matter of championing a healthy democratic process. To the managers of giant social media companies, most notably Facebook and Twitter, you would think it’s about, if nothing else, protecting a healthy cash cow. Either way, social media companies can and should do much more to rid their services of malicious fake news sites, haters and trolls. A fetid stream of such garbage diluted the quality of honest debate in the presidential election just ended. Bad for democracy. How long will folks want to post cute cat videos and vacation photos on a social media site that sinks into a swamp of deceit? Bad for business. We would hope social media companies are motivated by sheer self-interest to clean up their act. And, if nothing else, we would hope that many of us learned a big lesson during this election about the danger of fake news and have become more sophisticated consumers of information in the new media age.”

The Guardian expressed alarm at the proliferation of fake news sites and said: “Barack Obama, facing the imminent handover to his bombastic successor, has plenty to be concerned about… But he took the time to express his concern about the impact of fake news online. In an age where there’s so much active misinformation, and it’s packaged very well, and it looks the same when you see it on a Facebook page or you turn on your television … if everything seems to be the same and no distinctions are made, then we won’t know what to protect. Facebook has faced many controversies in its 12 short years, but has fumbled with the gravity and impact of its editorial power in an age where 62 per cent of US adults now turn to social media for some or all of their news, according to the Pew Research Centre.”

The Times of India analysed the problem’s impact on social influence and said: “The challenge for Mark Zuckerberg is to show that he is weeding out fake news without making Facebookers feel that they are no longer free to share whatever they like on this platform. But with Oxford Dictionary declaring post-truth as its word of the year, we are reminded that Facebook is only one manifestation, admittedly most prominent today, of a broader human appetite for falsehood. Closer home the latest fodder for this appetite has been provided by demonetisation, where rumors have gone viral on WhatsApp like firecrackers in the Diwali sky. Some of them are nasty, misleading and seem intended to cause riots. When reality is as chaotic as demonetisation in India or president-elect Trump in America, how much should we cage reports of this capricious reality?”