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Facebook Asks Users To Do The Job Of Flagging Fake News
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Facebook Asks Users To Do The Job Of Flagging Fake News
Bloomberg

Facebook Asks Users To Do The Job Of Flagging Fake News

Trending News: Only You Can Help Facebook Stop Fake News

Long Story Short

Facebook looks like it's rolling out a plan to combat the fake news that has taken over our news feeds with a short survey below stories asking the user if the headline is legit or not.

Long Story

No, CNN didn't broadcast hardcore porn during Parts Unknown?and no, Comet Ping Pong isn't a front for a child-sex ring operated by and for high-level Democratic Party operatives, but you probably saw provocative headlines about these stories on Facebook.?

Our news feeds have become flooded with baseless, conspiratorial and?straight-up fake news?lately and it's a huge, huge problem. In the final three months of the campaign?more fake news was shared than real journalism, which may very well have impacted the election. And when people believe crazy things, they do crazy things, as evidenced by the armed attack on Comet Ping Pong.

Following (real) news stories about fake news, both Facebook and Google promised to do something about it. They?vowed to prohibit fake news from their advertising networks. This, ideally, would make producing fake news less lucrative and thus less worthwhile to produce. And the results are already being felt. Those?teens in the Balkans who operate fake news sites aren't too happy about their loss in money from Google, according to Buzzfeed's Craig Silverman.?

But pulling AdSense and Facebook ad money isn't going to stop fake news altogether. Fake news sites can still get paid for clicks, and there are many companies still offering to dish them the dough, as explained by the 'Fake-News King'?to the NPR podcast Planet Money.

The only significant way to stop fake news will be to ban it, which is easier said than done. We obviously can't demolish the printing presses nor pull the plug on the servers. So, we'll have to go to the source of where we read this news, and for nearly half of Americans, that's Facebook.

But how would Mark Zuckerberg and co. go about killing fake news? Would they have their staff ban sites flagged as fake news? ?If so, how would they keep up with the?new sites popping up all the time? It'd be like whack-a-mole. And how would that impact the beloved Onion, Clickhole and The New Yorker's Borowitz Report who write satire?

Some journalists wondered (and hoped), that Facebook and Google might hire editors to curate the news, but it doesn't look like that that's going to happen. But here's what is.?

Facebook looks like it's asking its users to tackle the fake news problem by posting a questionaire belows stories about the effectiveness of the story's headline. Two?Twitter users posted what they saw:

Facebook told Mashable that this is an official feature for a small number of users, but wouldn't comment further.

What this new feature may do is help to stop clickbait-y headlines, which Facebook previously vowed to limit with an algorithm, but the problem with fake news isn't their headlines -- it's their entire existence.

Another way Facebook is tackling fake news is by giving users the option of reporting the post as fake. This is a good idea, but people are probably too lazy to do take the time to flag it. Plus, if the story has millions of shares, is Facebook going to just take it down? And what if people flag?a?New York Times story allegeing that it's filled with lies, as our president-elect so often says about?the newspaper of record? Would Facebook take it down?

We are truly living in a post-truth world and I doubt the fake news problem is going to go away with just a couple tweaks to Facebook. But Zuck's gotta?try.?

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No, three million illegal immigrants didn't vote for Hillary Clinton.?

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