After months of people pointing fingers and declaring what is and what isn’t “fake news“, Facebook has a starting place for identifying less-than-accurate news articles shared on the social media site. Fortune magazine brought this news to our attention in their article, “Facebook ‘Disputed News’ Tag Goes Live.”
Facebook’s new ‘Disputed’ tag will appear beneath news stories on the site that have been deemed inaccurate. They have also added a new Help page outlining how the system works. Facebook says that stories flagged as fake by users will be reviewed by independent fact-checking organizations including Politifact and Snopes.com.
Time will tell if the ‘disputed’ designation will have a direct impact on how a story is handled by Facebook’s ranking algorithms. In theory, users should be less likely to share stories with the tag, reducing their spread. The flagging process won’t stop sharing before or after the validation, which gives plenty of time for a story to make the rounds. But it is a start.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.
