Facebook Fact Checking is a thing now. It has been for a while. Indeed, I show you the process of reporting posts/articles as false news below.
Subscribe to my YouTube channel while you’re here!
Have a read of the full press release from Facebook here – but basically, you can report an article, or a picture, or an ad, for “false news”. From here, it is categorised into one of 9 categories –
- False
- Mixture
- True
- False Headline
- Not Eligible
- Satire
- Opinion
- Prank Generator
- Not Rated.
If news is deemed to be fake, which is something Fact Checkers assess, it could be restricted in its viewership, and pushed further down newsfeeds. Pages or people who share this will be seen less. Facebook expects an 80% drop in viewership to occur from this.
While it’s good that Facebook is going after anti-vaxers and other people spreading misinformation online, this could be bad for many reasons too, as I explain in the video above. Plus, it could also be not too effective. Shareable content gets seen most and often, people steal memes and reupload it too – something that helps no-one.
I wonder what your thoughts are.