Facebook have claimed that they are going to be more vigilant and start labelling and fact-checking fake news stories that appear in the News Feed.
Facebook have been in talks with several media organisations, including ABC News and Snopes, to help them perform the fact checking.
Facebook’s News Feed chief Adam Mosseri stated in a company blog that “we’ve focused our efforts on the worst of the worst, on the clear hoaxes spread by spammers for their own gain, and on engaging both our community and third party organisations”.
You might have seen these on your wall recently; fake news stories that are designed to spread lies about people in the public eye. The Onion and Daily Mash post ridiculous fake news as satire and comedy, but there are certain pages that have started posting less than hilarious articles.
One story, in particular, stirred a lot of undue outrage when it claimed that Pope Francis endorsed Donald Trump for the next President. When articles like these became popular and talked about they appear in Trending on Facebook; reaching more people and spreading misinformation on a global scale.
Facebook are making efforts to spare people who are being slandered and put a stop to click-bait on their site.
