Anyone who is a fan of Facebook, and real and actual news stories, has a reason to rejoice today because Facebook has taken steps to combat what has been called fake news, in order to provide its 1.86 billion users to get the actual truth on the website. Facebook has recently launched a tool that would help its users know just how much faith they should put in a story appearing on their site. The tool adds a “disputed news” flag on the stories that Facebook has decided are fake. If this tool sounds awfully familiar then it is because Facebook actually announced this tool way back in December 2016, but it has only actually taken effect in the last few days.
Those who would be sharing “disputed news” on the website, will be warned that the story is very likely to be fake.
How it works
So how does a story on Facebook get deemed fake? It turns out that Facebook has a team of researchers on hand. Those researchers go through stories on Facebook and determine which stories need to be sent to organizations that can fact check them such as Politifact and Snopes. If these organizations find out that the stories sent to them are less than factual, the stories will be flagged as being disputed news and will have a link with an explanation as to why it has been flagged as such.
The prevalence of fake news
This move is a very smart one by Facebook as the website often has more than it’s fair share of Fake News stories.
In fact, it is quite possible that the primary driver of the incorrect stories is on the web, and has in the past been subject of much criticism for having fake news stories. So no one can really blame them for wanting to tackle the problem head on. Ironically, fake news has actually been all over the actual news ever since the election of President Trump.
The notion of wrong stories had been a major topic of conversation and concern lately, and this had brought to light the prevalence of fake news stories on Facebook. The fake news might be staying on Facebook, but now it will be flagged for being bogus.
