Facebook Combats Fake News with New Feature

With everything that’s shared on Facebook nowadays, it’s hard to determine what’s a fact and what’s fake. To save you time and confusion, Facebook’s “related articles” section will now help you separate fact from fiction by displaying third-party fact checkers’ findings about each story.

Feedback from Facebook users showed that related articles are a big help and give people “more perspectives and additional info.” After hearing this, Facebook will be using an algorithm that can help pick out potentially fake news. Those flagged stories will be sent to fact-checkers to measure their degree of validity.

If a story is found to be a hoax, Facebook won’t list the link as a related article for that particular story. Fact-checkers will also publish their own version of the story, which will be posted in the related section. 

This new feature has already been rolled out in Germany, France, the Netherlands, and the US. Other locations will be getting the feature at a later date, depending on when Facebook can secure deals with fact-checkers in other locations worldwide.

Facebook hopes the additional stories in the Related section will help users pick out what’s fact and what’s not. What do you think about this addition to the social network? Let us know in the comments below!