Over the past couple of months, Facebook has been working on a method to combat fake news. Today, the company has begun rolling out the disputed tag on its website, which marks the first step the company is taking towards fake news.
Assuming that you’re living in the U.S., some stories of questionable origins may now come with a disputed tag located underneath the link. The tag itself will also link websites that counters the articles claims. As for the fact-checkers involved in the process, Facebook has said that it is working with ABC News, Politifact, FactCheck, Snopes, and the Associated Press to help fact-check news articles.
While the system is welcomed, it isn’t perfect. For one, an article will only be flagged as disputed only after users have reported the story or such, or if Facebook’s software manages to detect something abnormal. There is also the fact that the process of fact-checking itself is time consuming, so it is highly probable that the fake article itself would have been spread far and wide before the article is flagged as false. It is unlikely that the system will be all that effective, but Facebook has got to start somewhere and this is better than nothing.
Source: Gizmodo