Are you tired of all the phony news stories and links that seem to always show up on your Facebook timeline? Well you can breathe easier now. The company has announced plans to crackdown on hoaxes and fake news stories.
In a blog post Facebook stated that the purpose of its News Feed is to allow users to catch up on what their friends have been doing lately and not for people to post what is known as “News Feed Spam.” This is spam in the form of fake or misleading headlines intended just to drive traffic to a website.
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Part of the problem is that the average user does not always know when a story is fake. Be honest with yourself for just one moment and admit that even you have been taken in at some point by a fake Internet story.
Facebook said in its blog, “People often share these hoaxes and later decide to delete their original posts after they realize they have been tricked. These types of posts also tend to receive lots of comments from friends letting people know this is a hoax, and comments containing links to hoax-busting websites. In fact, our testing found people are two times more likely to delete these types of posts after receiving such a comment from a friend.”
Now people can not only delete a fake news item that showed up on their timelines but also explain why they did so. This will allow Facebook to filter out the spam and block it from being posted again.
The choices of why one decided to “hide” a posting include: It’s annoying or distasteful, its pornography, it advocates violence and it is false.
If you like satirical posts and fake headlines that are meant to be humorous, don’t worry. Facebook has promised that it will be able to detect such postings from the true spam so that they will not be filtered out of your timeline.
