Facebook, which has come under fire for fake news reports on its social network, is attempting to figure out the best way to deal with the problem. During the 2016 Presidential election, the fake news stories on Facebook were accused of influencing the outcome of the election.
A BuzzFeed analysis from last week reported that taking into consideration the number of likes, shares and comments on Facebook, the most popular news stories that were true were outperformed by the most popular news stories that were false.
One way that Facebook is considering to get the fake news problem under control is to indicate to its users when a story or content has been deemed as fake by other Facebook users or other outside groups.
According to a post by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, one technique that is still in development is to use “Warnings. We are exploring labeling stories that have been flagged as false by third parties or our community, and showing warnings when people read or share them.”
Facebook is currently working on developing several different ways to detect fake news stories. Now that the Presidential election is over, it’s likely that the number of fake new stories will decrease. However, it will be interesting to see impact of the techniques that Facebook implements when the next major political event occurs.
