Facebook needs your help putting an end to hoaxes littering your News Feed
In recent months, Facebook has grown into a cesspool of misinformation and erroneous news stories. After cracking down on clickbait articles and giving users even more ways to control their feeds, Facebook’s newest feature is hoping to finally put an end to all those fake news stories you see littering up the site.
Facebook defines them as “”deliberately false or misleading stories” and rolling out soon is a new option to report a post, picture, or video as “It’s a false news story.” If enough users flag a story, Facebook wont delete the story from their site, merely offer a warning in the post that the story has been reported by the Facebook community as containing false information, and readers should proceed with caution.
While it could be argued that many of these “fake news stories” are simply satire sites like The Daily Currant profiting off the naivety of Facebook’s extremely young/old/dumb user base, they’re not the target and should remain relatively unaffected. Facebook’s move is an attempt at debunking deliberate — sometimes costly — hoaxes like when 4Chan told iPhone users they could charge their phones by microwaving them, or that iOS 8 made their iPhone waterproof. That sorta thing.
I can’t tell you how many time I’ve, personally, had to be “that guy on the internet” telling friends and family that no, the Foo Fighters aren’t becoming a Christian band, or that an entire Texas town wasn’t, in fact, quarantined due to an Ebola outbreak. This should help make everyone’s lives a little easier on the social network and we applaud Facebook for taking action.