Facebook now flags and down-ranks fake news with help from outside fact checkers [eg snopes]

Tech Crunch ^ | 12/15/2016 | Josh Constine

[BenLurkin]

Snopes, FactCheck.org, Politifact, and ABC News will help Facebook make good on four of the six promises Mark Zuckerberg made about fighting fake news without it becoming “the arbiter of truth”. It will make fake news posts less visible, append warnings from fact checkers to fake news in the feed, make reporting hoaxes easier, and disrupt the financial incentives of fake news spammers.

“We’re not looking to get into the grey area of opinion” Facebook’s VP of News Feed Adam Mosseri tells me. “What we are focusing on with this work is specifically the worst of the work — clear hoaxes that were shared intentionally, usually by spammers, for financial gain.”

Facebook will now refer the most egregious and viral fake news articles flagged by users and algorithms to fact checking services that adhere to Poynter’s International Fact Checking Code of Principles. These include non-partisanship and fairness; transparency of sources, methodology, and funding; and a commitment to corrections. Facebook is starting with the four above but hopes to grow that list to dozens to quickly get a consensus on a story’s accuracy.

If they confirm a story is fake, they notify Facebook through a special reporting website it exclusively built for them, and can include a link to a post debunking the article. Facebook will then show posts of those links lower in the News Feed. It will also attach a warning label noting “Disputed by [one or more of the fact checkers]” with a link to the debunking post on News Feed stories and in the status composer if users are about to share a dubious link, plus prohibit disputed stories from being turned into ads.

[YogicCowboy]

Snoops joins forces with Snopes.

Both commie websites.

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

Another article on Facebook’s efforts to stop “fake news.”

PING!