Facebook keeps its promise, tells you which stories are fake

Mar 6, 2017 22:20 GMT  ·  By

Facebook is finally rolling out that "fake news" alerts it has been dangling in front of our face for months. Stories that are questionable will now have a "disputed" tag underneath, complete with a link that counters the article's claims. 

The social network has been thinking of implementing such a feature ever since the US elections were plagued by fake news that landed on everybody's news feeds thanks to buddies who don't really know how to pick their sources, Recode reports.

Facebook has addressed the issue numerous times over the past few months and has said it would take a few measures to keep fake news off the platform.

Back in December, Facebook announced it was working with ABC News, Politifact, FactCheck, Snopes and the Associated Press to verify stories. While it's absolutely great that questionable stories are flagged on the network, the process is slow, to say the least.

A rather lengthy process

Users first have to report a story as fake, or Facebook's software needs to notice something is off about it; whichever comes first. Then, fact-checking organizations need to take a look at the story and compare the facts to see if there's a problem or not. At least two of the organizations need to agree that it's fake before the label is applied for everyone to see.

This may take days and during this time the story may have reached countless people, which means the damage is done. Here's to hoping that Facebook will expand its list of associates to verify the news stories to speed up the process.

It remains to be seen whether people really care about this new label Facebook wants to slap on fake news or if they'll just pick and choose what to believe, as they've done in the past.