News Feed FYI: Addressing Hoaxes and Fake News
December 15, 2016
News Feed FYI: Addressing Hoaxes and Fake News
By Adam Mosseri, VP, News Feed
A few weeks ago we previewed some of the things we’re working on to address the issue of fake news and hoaxes. We’re committed to doing our part and today we’d like to share some updates we’re testing and starting to roll out.
We believe in giving people a voice and that we cannot become arbiters of truth ourselves, so we’re approaching this problem carefully. We’ve focused our efforts on the worst of the worst, on the clear hoaxes spread by spammers for their own gain, and on engaging both our community and third party organizations.
The work falls into the following four areas. These are just some of the first steps we’re taking to improve the experience for people on Facebook. We’ll learn from these tests, and iterate and extend them over time.
Easier
Reporting
We’re testing several ways to make
it easier to report a hoax if you see one on Facebook, which
you can do by clicking the upper right hand corner of a
post. We’ve relied heavily on our community for help on
this issue, and this can help us detect more fake
news.
Flagging Stories as Disputed
We
believe providing more context can help people decide for
themselves what to trust and what to share. We’ve started
a program to work with third-party fact checking
organizations that are signatories of Poynter’s International Fact Checking Code
of Principles. We’ll use the reports from our
community, along with other signals, to send stories to
these organizations. If the fact checking organizations
identify a story as fake, it will get flagged as disputed
and there will be a link to the corresponding article
explaining why. Stories that have been disputed may also
appear lower in News Feed.
It will still be possible to share these stories, but you will see a warning that the story has been disputed as you share.
Once a story is flagged, it can’t be made into an ad and promoted, either.
Informed Sharing
We’re
always looking to improve News Feed by listening to what the
community is telling us. We’ve found that if reading an
article makes people significantly less likely to share it,
that may be a sign that a story has misled people in some
way. We’re going to test incorporating this signal into
ranking, specifically for articles that are outliers, where
people who read the article are significantly less likely to
share it.
Disrupting Financial Incentives for
Spammers
We’ve found that a lot of fake news
is financially motivated. Spammers make money by
masquerading as well-known news organizations, and posting
hoaxes that get people to visit to their sites, which are
often mostly ads. So we’re doing several things to reduce
the financial incentives. On the buying side we’ve
eliminated the ability to spoof domains, which will reduce
the prevalence of sites that pretend to be real
publications. On the publisher side, we are analyzing
publisher sites to detect where policy enforcement actions
might be necessary.
It’s important to us that the stories you see on Facebook are authentic and meaningful. We’re excited about this progress, but we know there’s more to be done. We’re going to keep working on this problem for as long as it takes to get it right.