Facebook's News Feed is the most populated area on the social network. In the feature, various posts from friends, families, as well as advertisements are put in a manner where users can scroll to read what they like. The social giant has tried to make the News Feed as appealing as possible by tracking the user's habit, and now its also trying to eliminate hoaxes from populating it.
News Feed, is full of news and stories posted by others. As more users are using the social network, more people are abusing the News Feed to deliver fake and spammy information in the form of stories and news. Facebook is trying to change that as its attempt to remove the unwanted, calling them out dumb, viral hoaxes.
Social networks have been more than often being relied as a source for news by some people. As the internet kept growing and users increasing, the number of news posted on social media is as instant as the incident occurs. With those facts, many people believe that putting a post on Facebook, no matter how reliable or unreliable it is, it can create the viral engagement they want.
When users see undesirable stories and news, users will blame Facebook and the person who shared the post. The frustration leads them to visit Facebook less, and that is a problem for Facebook that the company needs to solve.
As the largest social media network on the web, Facebook realizes its role as the leading venue where lies spread. The company is trying to list its own users as "free mercenaries" to catch those lies and remove them from the network.
Starting January 21st, 2015, Facebook adds a little annotation noting that "many people on Facebook have reported that this story contains false information."
In a post option where users previously can mark stories as spam, or hide a post, users can now find an option to flag it.
Users can now flag those false news story, in much the same way they can flag pornographic and violent contents, explained Facebook.
To further help reducing the amount to hoaxes, Facebook acknowledged that just depending on users to flag the posts won't keep the numbers of further hoax news down. The social giant is also taking into account how many times a certain post is deleted, and then tries to pull the post from the collective feeds entirely.
"This means a post with a link to an article that many people have reported as a hoax or chosen to delete will get reduced distribution in News Feed. This update will apply to posts including links, photos, videos and status updates," said Facebook in the announcement.
Even though those posts may still be seen in the News Feed, Facebook said that it is adding a warning message to users as a way to let them know that the post has been reported as a potential hoax.
These attempt is Facebook's aim to make those hoax News Feed posts have the most minimum engagement. This in turn will make less people blaming Facebook for showing them annoying posts.
Despite 'down-rating' the hoaxes, Facebook claims that it won't be "removing stories people report as false" nor will it "review content and make a determination on its accuracy."
And when it comes to news websites that posts satirical information, the social network said that it has found in a test that people tend to not report contents that clearly created to make a few laughs. So as long as those websites don't get reported that often, Facebook sees the news as a well-accepted post, and not an 'undesirable' hoax.
