Facebook begins rolling out its much-anticipated solution to fake news
As spotted by Gizmodo Media Group’s Anna Merlan, Facebook has started to tag articles as “disputed” by third-party fact-checking organizations.
Facebook is flagging links to fake sites now, looks like: pic.twitter.com/N7xaWDkdYA
— Anna Merlan (@annamerlan) March 3, 2017
The company announced in December 2016 that it would start labelling and burying fake news. To do that, Facebook teamed up with a host of media organisations that are part of an international non-partisan fact-checking network led by journalism non-profit Poynter. The list includes 42 organisations, but Facebook is initially relying on four: Snopes, Factcheck.org, ABC News, and PolitiFact. (All fact-checkers are required to adhere to a code of principles created by Poynter.)
The new system is expected to make it easier for users to flag and report stories that are misleading or false. Those stories will then be reviewed by third-party fact-checkers and labelled as potentially fake in the News Feed.
Facebook also recently rolled out a new section explaining the process of how a story gets marked as disputed, and a step-by-step guide for how readers can mark a story as fake if something questionable comes across their feeds.
Read the full story here.
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