The social giant Facebook has released a flagging system for fake "hoax" news, tagging them as "disputed".
What began as criticisms to Facebook, especially for spreading misinformation during the 2016 election, Facebook promised to limit the spread of misleading information on its platform.
The feature was released on March 3rd, 2017, as a way for users to flag posts by others, in a transparent way.
Users can flag stories, not entire sites, but will still allow the post to appear on the social network. Flagged, or questionable stories are marked with a "disputed" tag underneath them with a link to a source countering the article's claims.
The social giant said that it is working with ABC News, Politifact, FactCheck, Snopes, and the Associated Press to verify stories.
Facebook is born as a social network. But as it matures, it ventured to more places to reach the media industry. With the billions of users it is having, Facebook has become the juggernaut of political news. While this is certainly an advancement to the already sophisticated network, Facebook finds itself in a difficult situation.
People are sensitive when it comes to politics.
Months before the feature debuted, some people were already in doubts, believing that the social media won't go far enough to eliminate such issue. But at the end, Facebook's solution should somehow please users, fact-checkers and free speech absolutists.
The feature, just like any other systems, can't be a 100 percent perfect. And it's also slow. After a user flags a story, Facebook needs to verify the story with fact-checkers and this can take them hours if not days. But at the very least, Facebook is doing something to limit the issue.