Enough is enough says Facebook to its fake news feeders. Fake news or hoax news won’t be taken lightly, says the social marketing giant. To put an end to fake news doing rounds on its platform, Facebook is all set to empower its 1.35 billion monthly active users ( stats as per the third quarter of 2014) by asking them to sit on their judgment seats and flag those news feeds that appear hoax to them.
As per industry sources, the process of flagging news won’t be difficult, as the users would be already applying the same tactics to flag pornographic and violent content.
How is this flagging going to help? Simple. As and when a user flags or deletes a hoax story, Facebook’s algorithms will automatically reduce its visibility in its news feed.
However, the company notes that it won’t be possible to delete these types of posts. But then, it will add a message warning users that the post contains false information. Nonetheless, stories that are satirical or humorous would remain unaffected by the update.
The newly introduced feature may bring down instances of news feed spam; however, one can’t deny misuse of this tool. For instance, there would cases in the future were in users may not agree with certain news feed, and may to report it as hoax, without any reason to do so. So automatically the visibility of that particular news declines, though it may be true in every sense of the word. Hopefully, Facebook will address this issue ASAP.
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