Fake news: Facebook is rolling out new tools to identify and report stories

Facebook has announced the rollout of new tools that will help the company fight the menace of ‘Fake News.’ This comes right after the company came under fire from US President Barak Obama and governments across the world to accountability for the inaccurate or fake news that is shared on the platform.  Facebook has pointed out that the tools will allow users to quickly report any fake news story using the ‘Report’ feature already present for the posts on Facebook. The company has added a new “It’s a fake news story” in the options and allows the users to mark the story as Fake and message the person who posted the story to notify about the story. Apart from relying on crowdsourcing to report the potential ‘Fake news stories,’ the company has also announced a partnership with third-party fact-checking companies. Facebook detailed that it is working with five companies about the fact-checking organisations which include ABC News, AP, FactCheck.org, Snopes and Politifact as reported by The Guardian. All the third-party fact-checking websites are signatories of Poynter’s International Fact Checking Code of Principles.  If a news story is pointed out as inaccurate, the post will include “Disputed by 3rd Party Fact-Checkers” providing a link to the article refuting the original news article.  One interesting thing to note is that both the features, Third-Party Fact Checkers and Crowd-sourcing to report articles do not work in isolation. The news articles are sent to the face checking websites after the original article has been reported as ‘Fake Story’ by sufficient amount of users. People sharing the disputed articles will get a warning sign informing them about the disputed status of the article. According to the company, the ‘Disputed’ articles will figure lower on the newsfeed and the publisher or the person who posted the article can not promote the article. The company announced that it had removed the ability to spoof domain names to stop confusion caused by such domains.