This Is True: Facebook Starts Cracking Down On Hoax News Stories

[inanna]

Source: NPR

January 21, 2015 5:02 PM ET

Facebook's on a mission to make your News Feed a little more truthful.

The social media giant has announced it will start doing more to alert users when stories they're seeing in their feeds are fake. And it will allow users to start flagging hoaxes themselves. But Facebook says it won't remove false stories. And the company says it won't start "reviewing content and making a determination on its accuracy."

Facebook recently added an option that allows users to report false stories in their news feed. Users had already been able to report spam and scam content. Once a story is flagged enough, the company will start adding the following message to stories it thinks might be fake: "Many people on Facebook have reported that this story contains false information." And, Facebook said, a story that's been flagged as a hoax "will get reduced distribution in News Feed."

Facebook isn't alone in cracking down on fake news. As NPR's David Folkenflik previously reported, a company called Storyful works to authenticate social media content for journalists, so that news outlets can know if what they're seeing and reporting online is actually true. Storyful helped flag a fake twerking video made by ABC's Jimmy Kimmel and a hoax video of an eagle snatching a baby in a park.



Read more: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2015/01/21/378888754/this-is-true-facebook-starts-cracking-down-on-hoax-news-stories?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=news

[wyldwolf]

1. FOX News immediately protests....

[inanna]

2. ...

[father founding]

3. Main Hoax

No more news of any type on FB including stories about FB which is a Hoax in itself.

[inanna]

4. Don't like it?

Then don't look.

Quite simple really.

Yeah?

[Fred Sanders]

5. FB is not a hoax. They promised us space ships, when we were young...... but they did give us FB.

[unrepentant progress]

6. I'm not sure how this constitutes cracking down

It's the equivalent of those small print boxes on newspaper stories telling you it's actually an ad.

[pasto76]

7. the eagle was a fake?!? bummer

not wishing harm on anyone but dammit that would have been amazing

[Dr Hobbitstein]

8. It's about fucking time...

I can't direct people to Snopes enough... It gets harder when you're arguing against teabillies who claim Snopes is a liberal media mouthpiece funded by George Soros.

[former9thward]

9. There are hundreds of millions of posts on FB everyday.

How could they possibly determine the truth of them?

[McCamy Taylor]

12. They can't. This will allow corporations like Monsanto to censor Facebook

because they will be able to hire a gazillion "people" to complain every time they are criticized.

[7962]

10. The problem is if they flag posts simply because others flag them. Who's checking the flags?

A group of people could flag a post simply because they didnt like it, not because it was fake. Would they check out the validity of a story themselves or simply flag it because it was "brought to their attention"? I.E., What if a bunch of people flagged a post about limbaugh and his drug usage as fake?

[McCamy Taylor]

11. If they censor, we will no longer be allowed to write anything bad about Monsanto.

So no, I do not agree with censorship. If people are not sure if the story is true, they can google it.

[chrisa]

13. Most stories on Facebook are fake. Are they going to delete every one?

Just in the past week I've heard that the world is going to end in 2015 (how original), onions become poisonous the moment you chop them, and that NASA is worried about / gets information about the coming end of the world from concerned Inuit tribal leaders.

[GOLGO 13]

14. LAFFO if anyone takes "news" on FB as real

FB get trolled big time constantly by the goons at SA.

[LannyDeVaney]

15. Oh no! Whatever will my grandmother do now?

WND traffic will drop 99%.

[quadrature]

16. FB.. The Supreme Court of Truth ..

who believes that?