Facebook has now decided to reduce the impact of fake news stories shared by adding the option to flag them. In other words, the new Facebook feature is to enable flagging hoaxes on Facebook News Feed i.e. to enable users flag news hoaxes or false news.
Facebook is easily one of the most widely used social networking platform across the world. With time passing by, Facebook has been more than just personal Facebook status updates, photos shared, etc. The Facebook News Feed has increased the craze among teenagers and youth to check out happening news stories and share the same on this social platform. On Facebook timeline, we now see lots of news stories being shared as well as useful article links.
The news sharing on Facebook is like a double-edged sword. It has several advantages since it keeps more people informed about things happening around the world. At the same time, there are several news stories which are obtained from unreliable sources. So, without even confirming the truth about such news, Facebook users keep sharing the news ahead which spreads like wild-fire due to the sensational topics involved. You can now simply flag fake news stories on Facebook.
How to Flag Fake News Stories on Facebook
As mentioned earlier, it is now possible to report any deceitful news story as fake on Facebook social networking platform. The process would be pretty similar to the way we can report or flag pornographic content or violent content on Facebook.
When we read any post on Facebook that contains news (or URL to news) which are unconfirmed or just plain rumors, we can click on the drop-down arrow at the top corner of the post. It will show an option like “Report Post”. Facebook is planning to add the necessary flag for fake news in the list of reporting choices displayed when one clicks on “Report Post” option.
As per Facebook, we will then be able to see a new list of choices including one stating “It’s a false news story” as seen below.
However, Facebook won’t be deleting the deceitful or rumored news from its feeds section. The Facebook algorithm which determines the algorithm for distribution of news items in News feeds will take into account the number of times any such Facebook post is reported as fake or false by users.
The more the post is flagged as fake, the less chances it will have to appear in Facebook News Feed section. This makes more sense as it will not be possible for Facebook to check the authenticity of every post or remove every post that contains doubtful information or hoax news.
Also, it is believed that certain posts about which most complaints are received in the form of flags (for false news) would be served official annotations from Facebook such as “Many people on Facebook have reported that this story contains false information”.
Thus, as seen above, it would be pretty easy to flag any news on Facebook which contains fake information in future. As a responsible citizen of the world, each one of us needs to use social networking platform correctly and take necessary actions against stuff that could cause potential harm or panic in any corner of the world.
By introducing this new feature to flag incorrect news stories, Facebook would indeed have contributed its bit to the society. It would then be up to all Facebook users that such feature gets used frequently that will help Facebook to take necessary action against the fake news sources or stop publishing them in their News Feed.
Is this a precursor to Internet censorship? Who decides whats fake and whats not?