Facebook Shrinks Fake News

Fake news are being shrinked by Facebook. Fake news are in the News Feed are harder to see as Facebook is shrinking the size of the links to content that has been verified by third-party fact-checkers as inaccurate. According to a Facebook spokesperson, they have reduced the visual prominence of feed stories that are fact-checked false.

Fake news appear on mobile as a headline and image in one small row. Accurate news links feature a large feature and are considerably more noticeable.

Facebook’s New Strategy

This development is Facebook’s new strategy to combat misleading information. Facebook gave details of this new strategy at the Fighting Abuse @ Scale conference in San Francisco. Director of News Feed Michael McNally and data scientist Lauren Bose spoke about Facebook’s ecosystem approach to tackling fake news. This strategy include removing false accounts and assets like clusters of fraudulently created Pages. Banning ads on malicious pages, and limiting the distribution of false posts are also included in this strategy be Facebook.

Other Developments

Facebook will also use Artificial Intelligence combined with flagged user reports to moderate content. Machine learning is used to predict posts that are more likely to be false news. This will help prioritize materials being sent to fact-checkers.
But modernization will always be a problem, especially on a huge platform where posts are constant. Facebook announced that it would no longer use Disputed Flags to identify false news. They would use its related articles instead.

The more you tell people not to do something, the more they do it. Human nature probably. That is what happened when Facebook put the red flags on debunked fake news. Users who believed the fake news actually shared the hoaxes more.

Facebook had to ditch the red flags in favor of Related Articles with more level headed perspective from trusted new sources.

Censorship Or Sensibility

Facebook is trying to walk a fine line between censorship or sensibility. The purpose of shrinking fake news is to make it easier to miss these stories rather than call more attention to it. Facebook said that this development can reduce the spread of fake news by 80%. But they have yet to prove it. Much work need to be done and the company is hiring more people to ensure that this strategy will be effective.