Facebook(NEW YORK) — Facebook announced on Thursday that it will take a number of concrete steps to prevent hoaxes and fake news from spreading on the social network.
“We believe in giving people a voice and that we cannot become arbiters of truth ourselves, so we’re approaching this problem carefully,” the company wrote in a statement. “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 organizations.”
Users will now be able to flag a story as “fake news” by clicking on the upper right hand corner of a post, as they have previously been able to do for stories they wanted to hide or report as spam.
Facebook is also starting a program with third-party fact checking organizations to help users spot fake stories. If the organizations identify the story as fake, it will be flagged, and a link will take users to an article explaining why the facts in the article are disputed.
ABC News is one of the organizations that will use Facebook data to help users sort fact from fiction when they report a fake story. On Thursday, ABC News launched “The Real News About Fake News”. Stories examined will undergo rigorous reporting to determine if the claims made are false.
Some of the other methods Facebook is rolling out to tackle fake news will be less visible to users. The social network said it will track whether reading a particular article makes people significantly less likely to share it.
“[T]hat may be a sign that a story has misled people in some way,” the statement read.
Facebook said it would also work to prevent spammers from making money through the site by pretending to be real publications.
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