Facebook has started putting out ads in newspapers to held readers spot fake news. The company listed out ten things to look out for in news stories to weed out fake news. The ads appeared in The Times, The Guardian and Daily Telegraph among others.
“We know people want to see accurate information on Facebook – and so do we,” Adam Mosseri, Facebook’s vice president, news feed, wrote in a blog post in April. “False news and hoaxes are harmful to our community and make the world less informed.”
In March, the company had launched a new function that would help mark fake news as “disputed”. The new tool will help identify websites and sources that are likely to put out misinformation. The social media giant’s tool uses fact-checkers like Politifact and Snope to identify fake news.
Facebook has also added how to mark a story as “disputed”. A user can click on the right of the post and choose an option allowing them to mark it as fake news. Once the story is reported, it will be reviewed by third-party checkers that Facebook has teamed up with, like Poynter Institute, which is a media ethics organisation. However, it is not clear how many users or which Facebook users have access to this feature.
There has been widespread speculation that voters in the United States were swayed by fake news on social media that had pushed them to vote for Donald Trump. Facebook and Google had been accused of helping mislead voters by allowing misinformation to be spread by their websites. The company is trying to avoid a repeat of the US elections at the general elections in the United Kingdom on June 8.
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