Image credit – TechCrunch
Facebook has been fighting fake news from being shared and posted on its platform and have come up with all kinds of ways to deal with it. One of those ways in the past was by actually warning users of a fake news article with a huge red warning label, but unfortunately this backfired as it made users want to share it even more.
Now it looks like Facebook has come up with an interesting solution, and that is they will literally shrink fake news links that are being shared. In the screenshot above, the image to the left shows a link that has been shared to an article that has been suspected of being fake, and below it it shows related fact-checked articles that users might be interested in.
In the image to the right, it shows how links to articles that do not contain fake information actually look like when shared, and as you can tell the fake news one is smaller and less visible. Presumably this is so that when users are scrolling through their News Feed, they might miss these links entirely in favor of articles that have been fact-checked.
Facebook has since confirmed these changes in a statement made to TechCrunch’s Josh Constine which reads, “We reduce the visual prominence of feed stories that are fact-checked false.”
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