Facebook Adds Report Option To Flag Stories As Hoaxes Or Inaccurate

Where social media is concerned, I have an almost innumerable number of pet peeves, but some do stand out more than the others. Such as people sharing misinformation that should raise red flags right away, as well as the sharing of hoaxes. Well, it seems that Facebook itself doesn’t care too much about that either, so it’s added a feature to help combat it.

Going forward, when someone reports a story in their feed a new option will be available: “It’s a false news story”. Facebook isn’t using this as a way to automatically remove the post from your friend’s wall, though. Instead, it’s a way to build up a repository of votes from all users site-wide. If a story receives a certain number of these reports, a message will be displayed above it. An example would be: “Many people n Facebook have reported that this story contains false information.”

For sites writing up these hoaxes or misleading stories in the first place, this ultimately means that their site will be seen a lot less often if many reports happen. After a while, Facebook will begin treating a certain source as unreliable, and will simply stop showing related posts as often as before. Bad for the site, great for the regular Facebook lurker.

Facebook notes that for the most part, hoaxes and misleading stories that people on the service share don’t often last that long, as once a friend points out that it’s inaccurate, the person will often remove it. But what I think would be nice is, once a site is flagged too much, they’re automatically flagged for a while, where any story will be marked as potentially inaccurate. I think that would go a long way in helping to cut down on such stories on Facebook or any type of social media.