Following the increasing pressure to tackle fake news on Internet, Facebook has finally come up with a feature to deal with fake news, ahead of next month's general election in UK.
Facebook is using algorithms to crack down on misleading articles and its new feature will be able to detect the fake news automatically, reported Independent.
"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," said the company. "In December, we started 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. We're now expanding the test to the UK," it added.
Facebook is gearing up to deal with the issue like a clickbait and it discovered that a lot of users do click on news that starts with phrases like "You'll never guess what happened next..." and "This one trick..." but they do not spend much time in it before returning back to the News Feed. Facebook will be tracking down exactly this and also the fake accounts, which are believed to be spreading the majority of the false stories.
Before the first-round Presidential election in UK, Facebook has already suspended 30,000 accounts in France.
"We've made improvements to recognize these inauthentic accounts more easily by identifying patterns of activity — without assessing the content itself," Facebook said in a statement. "For example, our systems may detect repeated posting of the same content, or an increase in messages sent. With these changes, we expect we will also reduce the spread of material generated through inauthentic activity, including spam, misinformation, or other deceptive content that is often shared by creators of fake accounts."
In another bid to tackle this issue, the social media platform has recently added a box to the top of users' News Feeds, directing them to a page filled with tips for spotting fake news. These tips, which include "Be skeptical of headlines" and "Watch for unusual formatting", are available on Facebook's Help Centre, but the company has decided to run it as an advert "across the UK press" too, said Independent.
"We can't solve this problem alone so we are supporting third party fact-checkers during the election in their work with news organisations, so they can independently assess facts and stories," said Simon Milner, Facebook's director of policy for the UK, according to the publication.
Both Facebook and Google are supporting Full Fact and First Draft to "work with major newsrooms" to deal with the rumors and misleading information spreading over the Internet during the UK election.
