During the last US presidential campaign, it was recorded that a large amount of fake information about President Donald Trump and the Republican presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton were spread on Facebook and Google.
Immediately Google does something about it by blocking all the means used for spreading the fake news on their site, which is by reprogramming the Google news algorithm and by blocking their channels from the Google Adsense display network.
Since then, all eyes were on deck expecting what Facebook will do about it, and now the good news is here, Facebook has just launched a tool that will be used to flag links to the fake news site as disputed and this will, therefore, reduce the spread of fake news through Facebook.
How does it work?
The Facebook tool is linked to some third-party fact-checking sites like snopes.com and Politifact. Snopes.com is a website that is established to thoroughly check all the information on the internet and clears out those that are fake among them while Politifact is setup to cross check political news from government officials whether they are true or not. However, to prove Facebook seriousness about the war against the spread of fake news, all the fact-checking sites that Facebook signed a contract with will need to sign a “code of principle” from the Poynter School of journalism.
Moreover, Facebook has made it easy to recognize fake news by burying and labeling it has hoaxes and made it easier to report fake news if you see any in the news feed. What you need to do is just to move to the upper right side corner of the post and click on the “it’s a fake news story” and immediately, the Fact-checking websites will evaluate it and if the news article is proven to be fake then it will not be promoted by Facebook.
In addition, it has been confirmed that Facebook is currently collecting the list of websites that are well recognized for posting fake news so that they will be blacklisted and flagged automatically.
When should we expect to see the Facebook news dispute?
Although, up to the time this article is written, Facebook news articles that have been flagged as fake are not showing for everyone yet and this has confirmed to us that the new tool is still under test to know how effective it will be before making it general. However, the feature is said to be made available for everyone to use in the coming weeks.
