Facebook Will Cut Back On Hoaxes In Your News Feed

Aiming to cut down on the spread of false information, Facebook said it will flag posts that appear to be hoaxes and show fewer of them in people’s News Feeds.

Facebook isn’t planning a Snopes-style effort; it won’t be attempting to verify or debunk stories posted on its network. Instead it will depend on reports from users. Facebook recently added a option for people to report a story as false.

If enough people flag a story as false, Facebook will append a message to the post, like so:
“Many people on Facebook have reported that this story contains false information.”

Such posts will have reduced distribution in the News Feed, Facebook reported in a blog post announcing the change.

In testing, Facebook said, it found that people don’t usually report “satirical content intended to be humorous, or content that is clearly labeled as satire.” So posts from The Onion’s Facebook page will apparently be spared.

Last summer, Facebook experimented with a “Satire” tag, that was applied to stories from certain sites, including The Onion. The tags only displayed within the related items section in the News Feed and often were not applied to stories from sites that seemed more deceptive than satirical, as this Washington Post story found.

About The Author

Martin Beck

Martin Beck is Third Door Media’s Social Media Reporter, covering the latest news for Marketing Land and Search Engine Land. He spent 24 years with the Los Angeles Times, serving as social media and reader engagement editor from 2010-2014. A graduate of UC Irvine and the University of Missouri journalism school, Beck started started his career at the Times as a sportswriter and copy editor.