Nothing should make people feel better than an announcement from a major technology and social media company that it will be watching out for them. From Uncola at theburningplatform.com:
On December 15th, 2016 Facebook announced a series of measures designed to address what they have termed the “issue of fake news and hoaxes”. The assault on fake news by Facebook will consist of four initiatives including: Easier reporting by readers, flagging stories as disputed, informed sharing and disrupting financial incentives for spammers.
If Facebook readers, in their infinite wisdom, decide a certain shared story is a hoax, they can simply click the right hand corner of the post. This is great. Why, it might even make the Facebook community a last line of defense in the online information war. I don’t know about you, but I, for one, am going to sleep much better knowing this. What could go wrong?
Next, in order to flag any story as fake news, Facebook has started a program working with third-party fact checking organizations that are “signatories of Poynter’s International Fact Checking Code of Principles”.
Thirdly, “Informed Sharing” is explained by Facebook in this way:
We’re always looking to improve News Feed by listening to what the community is telling us. We’ve found that if reading an article makes people significantly less likely to share it, that may be a sign that a story has misled people in some way. We’re going to test incorporating this signal into ranking, specifically for articles that are outliers, where people who read the article are significantly less likely to share it.
To continue reading: Who Will Watch the Watchers?
