Nataly
On Thursday, Facebook announced some new measures the company took to fight the spread of misinformation. The company said in a statement that its team has “relied heavily on [Facebook] community for help on this issue.”
“We believe in giving people a voice and that we cannot become arbiters of truth ourselves, so we’re approaching this problem carefully,” the company said.
Now users can flag a hoax by choosing a new option titled “it’s a fake news story” in the upper right hand corner of a post.
Stories flagged as “fake” will be verified by third-party fact-checking organizations that participate in the partner program with Facebook.
“If the fact checking organizations identify a story as fake, it will get flagged as disputed and there will be a link to the corresponding article explaining why,” the company said.
Such stories will also appear lower in News Feed.
Facebook will also warn a user before sharing a “disputed” story.
“Once a story is flagged, it can’t be made into an ad and promoted, either,” said in the statement.
The social network will also analyze users’ actions about news stories. For example, if people are “significantly less likely to share” a story after reading it, that may indicate that the article may be misleading.
Facebook also said that it will try to “reduce the financial incentives” for spammers, who post fake news in order to just make people visit their sites.
