Facebook announced Thursday it is offering tips on how to spot “fake news” in a special section at the top of the News Feed.
“False news is harmful to our community, it makes the world less informed, and it erodes trust,” Adam Mosseri, vice president of News Feed, writes in an official Facebook blog post.
The new feature will premier in 14 countries for a short period of time in what appears to be a pilot test.
After clicking on the tool, “they will see more information and resources in the Facebook Help Center, including tips on how to spot false news, such as checking the URL of the site, investigating the source and looking for other reports on the topic,” reads a separate blog post composed by Mosseri.
More tips include source investigating — flagging websites that look unfamiliar or that contain formatting or spelling errors — and distinguishing satire and parody.
The announcement comes a day before fellow tech conglomerate Google rolled out the latest “fake news” feature, which uses media outlets like Politifact and Snopes.
Similarly, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that he would be partnering with Snopes to help combat fake news, even though it almost exclusively employs leftists.
“Anyone on Facebook can report any link as false, and we use signals from those reports along with a number of others — like people sharing links to myth-busting sites such as Snopes — to understand which stories we can confidently classify as misinformation,” Zuckerberg wrote on his own social media profile.
Publications have questioned Snopes’ fact-checking skills after numerous attempts to invalidate certain stories backfired.
Google also banned roughly 200 publishers in January, partly due to its policy on misleading or false news.
Facebook and Google are following similar paths, purging or labeling news stories as fake based on the subjectivity of media outlets proven to have a slant and bias.
“False news runs counter to our mission to connect people with the stories they find meaningful. We will continue working on this and we know we have more work to do,” Mosseri concludes.
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