Sharing news articles and stories on Facebook should be done responsibly. After all with information so easily shared and spread, more often than not we come across a story that turns out to be a hoax, only to have been shared and discussed as if it was the real deal. Turns out that Facebook has had enough of these fake stories and are doing something about it.The social network has been working on trying to weed out these stories from the News Feed of its users. How Facebook is doing this isn’t by actually deleting the posts themselves, but rather relying on users to flag them, which can be done by either deleting the posts in their feed themselves, or flagging them as a “false news” story via a drop-down menu.
The resulting post will not be deleted, like we said, but rather they will be given as little distribution as possible. In the event that they do appear on your feed, an accompanying message will show that the story in question is possibly a fake, which you can see in the screenshot above.
So what about satirical websites? Thankfully Facebook still has a sense of humor and will be leaving them alone, as long as they clearly state that they are intended to be humorous. According to Facebook, “We’ve found from testing that people tend not to report satirical content intended to be humorous, or content that is clearly labeled as satire. This type of content should not be affected by this update.”
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