Facebook will shrink fake news in the hopes that you won’t see it

Ever at the top of Facebook’s list of woes is its struggle with fake news. Facebook has tried several different approaches, but none of them really seem to have worked. The struggling social media giant’s latest solution is to shrink fake news in the hopes that readers won’t notice it so easily. [caption id=“attachment_4400613” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Facebook logo[/caption] As TechCrunch notes in its report, Facebook’s original approach to fake news may have had a forbidden fruit appeal to it. Fake news was flagged and specifically fact checked by several other, more reputable news sites. However, this approach apparently had little impact on the problem. Facebook’s latest solution to the problem, discussed at the Fighting Abuse @Scale conference in San Francisco, is to reduce the size of fake news posts, making them less prominent in the news feed. A TechCrunch reporter was told that Facebook intends to “reduce the visual prominence” of posts known to be fake news. Images sourced by TechCrunch reveal fake news posts that are a tenth of the size of regular news posts. The report also adds that Facebook is using machine learning and AI to determine the likelihood of a story being fake. Fact-checkers then receive a prioritised list of stories for checking. Several other steps for combating fake news were listed, including the deletion of accounts made using fake credentials, identifying channels that create fake news, limiting fake news distribution, etc. Facebook believes that such methods will reduce the incidence of fake news on its platforms by up to 80 percent.