With the rise of social media and how quickly and easily things can go viral, sometimes what happens is that stories and news reports that aren’t real are shared and are quickly bought into. This results in a lot of misinformation which is obviously a bad thing, and fake news is a problem that Facebook has in the recent months been trying to combat.
However the good news is that some of their efforts are already starting to materialize as the social network has started to flag stories that might be fake with a “disputed” tag. This is something that the company announced back in December as part of its efforts to combat fake news, and it looks like it has already begun to roll out.
In case you’re learning about this for the first time, this “disputed” tag basically means that the article/story in question might not necessarily be accurate. The tag will also be accompanied with links to fact-checking websites that will provide evidence and an explanation as to why it might not be true.
This label is only slapped onto posts that have either been flagged by multiple users, caught by Facebook’s own software, or verified/disputed by fact-checking websites, such as Snopes or Politifact, which should add a level of credibility to it. So the next time you see an article that has been flagged as “disputed”, you can probably safely assume that its content might be questionable.
Filed in . Read more about Facebook.