Facebook to combat hoaxes, fake news with new upgrades

Facebook’s News Feed VP Adam Mosseri addressed on Thursday the spread of hoaxes and fake news as well as what the social media site is doing about the issue.

Mosseri shared in a Facebook newsroom post some of the updates and fixes that they were testing to minimize the spread of hoaxes and fake news on the platform in the US.

READ: Facebook in crosshairs as fake news battle heats up

“We believe in giving people a voice and that we cannot become arbiters of truth ourselves, so we’re approaching this problem carefully,” Mosseri wrote.

“We’ve focused our efforts on the worst of the worst, on the clear hoaxes spread by spammers for their own gain, and on engaging both our community and third party organizations.”

Mosseri called the upgrades as the “first steps” that they are taking to improve Facebook’s user experience. “We’ll learn from these tests, and iterate and extend them over time.”

He noted that they are testing several ways to make it easier to report a hoax. Users can easily report a hoax or fake news in their News Feed by clicking the upper right-hand corner of the post to help Facebook detect more of them.

The social networking site also aims to work closely with fact-checking organizations to verify stories that are being shared by the users. Reports from the community as well as other signals will be used to send the stories to these organizations, which will then check and flag the stories as disputed.

READ: Facebook partners with fact-checkers to eradicate fake news

They are also improving Facebook’s informed sharing and disrupting financial incentives for spammers.

Fake news stories are nothing new in the US and the Philippines. In fact, many fake election stories have been published over the Internet.

Analysis also showed that top fake election news stories generated more total engagement on Facebook than top election stories from 19 major news outlets combined.

“We’re excited about this progress, but we know there’s more to be done. We’re going to keep working on this problem for as long as it takes to get it right,” he wrote. RAM