With the assistance of both users and outside fact checkers, Facebook has revealed its plans to flag fake news stories that crop up on the social network. This will work through users firstly flagging the potential fake stories and this report being referred to outside fact-checking organisations once enough users flag a story as fake. Among these fact-checkers will be ABC News, AP, FactCheck.org, Politifact and Snopes (none of these organisations being paid for their services). If they deem it that a story is fake, it'll be 'publicly flagged as "disputed by 23rd party fact-checkers."' Users can view why exactly a story was disputed and if they still want to go ahead and share it, they'll be further warned about the reliability of it. Along with this, stories that are shared more by people who've only read the headline as oppose to actually clicking on them and reading the text will be also clearly marked out. While these two procedures will be taken, Facebook is also taking measures to reduce the financial benefits that come with making fake news websites. Activist and journalist Daniel Sieradski, has said that this announcement is a definite step in the right direction but it is still susceptible to failure since 'false-flagging' of fake news by people will occur which only make the process more difficult.
It's clear here that the influx of fake news that there now is, is something that is recognised by Facebook as a danger to society. This contrasts hugely from the attitude taken by founder, Mark Zuckerberg just a few weeks ago. Daniel Sieradski's thoughts on the move the social network has taken match those of mine. While it's definitely a good approach to take in terms of stopping the circulation of the news, 'false-flaggers' pose a huge challenge to the true effectiveness of the procedures and could essentially prevent it from working altogether if not combated against.
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