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SAN FRANCISCO — Each weekday after making the kids' lunches, Lisel Laslie takes out her iPhone to scroll through Facebook over her morning cup of coffee.
At noontime, while eating lunch at her desk, this 48-year-old mother of two from Tallahassee, Fla., sneaks another peek at her notifications and News Feed. In the evening after she tucks the kids into bed, she curls up in the living room for an hour or two of blissfully uninterrupted social-media updates.
But over the summer when bogus articles trashing both presidential candidates began flooding her News Feed, Laslie began posting less frequently and spending less time on Facebook.
"Facebook is a place to go for distraction. I want to see puppies and pictures of my friends' kids. Then your feed gets clogged up with all that stuff," she said.
Facebook has a fake news problem. And some of its users are fed up with it. They're not sure if the solution is to let the social network, with its own biases, decide what's true. Or whether they themselves should become better fact-checkers.
"I find myself wasting my day verifying stories," says Kristen Stanley, 49, a homemaker from Morgan City, La., who used to work in the shipbuilding industry. "I didn't used to do that. It's all new, and it's all started with the election."
It turns out that by creating the world's most popular place to share, Facebook also created the world's most efficient delivery system for fake news.
Some 170 million people in North America use Facebook every day. Nearly half of all adults in the U.S. say they get their news from Facebook. Fake news creates significant public confusion about current events, with nearly one-fourth of Americans saying they have shared a fake news story, according to a Pew Research Center survey.
And that angers Stanley. She wishes her friends would do some research before sharing "nonsense."
"Some of it makes me wonder if my friends have brains," says Stanley, whose News Feed during the election was rife with "things on both sides that were completely false."
Facebook unveils first serious effort to wipe out fake news
Facebook has taken a lot of heat since the election for not doing enough to remove fake news reports, such as a widely shared but erroneous article claiming Pope Francis endorsed Donald Trump.
Facebook starts to experiment
The giant social network is taking steps to do something about it. On Thursday, Facebook said it was rolling out a series of experiments to stem the flow of fake news. It plans to make it easier to report a hoax and for fact-checking organizations to flag fake articles. It's also removing financial incentives for spammers and plans to pay closer attention to other signals, such as which articles Facebook users read but then don't share. Last month, Facebook barred fake news sites from using its ad-selling services.
Not everyone is happy about that. When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced efforts to wipe out fake news in a Facebook post, some users responded with skepticism.
"How will you know if these fact checkers are not politically motivated or affiliated themselves?" one user asked. "Even 'respected' news outlets are biased and misrepresent news as it is. It's a very grey complex area."
Another replied: "People choose what they want to read and what they don't want to read, so what gives you the right to decide what people get to read?"
Stanley, a Trump supporter, says demonstrably false news needs to go.
"I really do believe these articles cause problems. They destroy friendships," she said. "Facebook people take it way too seriously and extremely personally. Everything is so negative now. I don't like to get on Facebook. It's depressing."
Sharing fake news has picked fights and eroded family ties. Summer Davis, 35, a writer and blogger from Santa Rosa Beach, Fla., says she has family members who regularly spread fake news. She even unfollowed one of them whom she says scans headlines of fake news articles and shares them without reading them — the more sensational the better.
Davis says she herself hasn't been fooled by fake news. But, she says, "some of the headlines have definitely caused some anxiety before I could fact-check."
Holding Facebook responsible for the fake-news onslaught doesn't sit right with Davis, though. That, she says, "is like blaming McDonald's for obesity."
"The real problems are ignorance and this fast-food society that expects information served hot and fast whether it's true or not," she said. "There is too much knee-jerk emotion happening and not enough fact checking."
Not everyone wants Facebook to step in and become the arbiters of what content is misleading. That is rooted in the growing distrust of establishment news sources. A Gallup Poll in September said Americans' trust in the media had sunk to its lowest point ever, with only 32% of American saying they have a "great deal" or "a fair amount" of confidence that the media reports the news "fully, accurately and fairly."
Danielle Sgantas, a self-identified conservative from Yucca Valley, Calif., says she has never been fooled by fake news sites. And, she says, she believes the fake news controversy was created to crack down on alternative sources of news "so that we only get the news that the Democrats, which includes about 99% of the news media, wants us to hear and believe."
"I want freedom of speech to continue. I want alternative news sites not to be censored," she said. "I can determine what is real and what is not real by making searches on my own."
Fake-news fighters enter breach left by Facebook, Google
Others believe something has to be done. Whitney Hoffman, 50, a digital marketer from Chadds Ford, Pa., says fake news is a virus that should be stamped out by any means necessary. Every day during the election, she says she saw things in her News Feed "that were completely false and that were obviously false." But, she says, she also saw fake news that could dupe even very news-savvy people.
"Some of it sounds plausible, and when it's spread by trusted friends, there's an assumption it must be true," Hoffman said. "I feel like we all need to wear finger condoms every day, otherwise we are going to spread fake-news viruses everywhere."
The Fake web: why we're so apt to believe fake news, apps and reviews
Laslie, who says she was embarrassed when she unwittingly shared fake news on Facebook, has come up with a radical solution of her own. She doesn't share articles on Facebook anymore. It's just too much work figuring out what's real, she says.
"It's like I am an investigative reporter and I have to check eight sources before sharing anything," Laslie said. "I will share pictures of kitties and animals all day long before I share a news story."
Follow USA TODAY senior technology writer Jessica Guynn @jguynn
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