By 
In recent months, Facebook has grown into a cesspool of misinformation and erroneous news stories. After cracking down on clickbait articles and giving users even more ways to control their feeds, Facebook’s newest feature is hoping to finally put an end to all those fake news stories you see littering up the site.
Facebook defines them as “”deliberately false or misleading stories” and rolling out soon is a new option to report a post, picture, or video as “It’s a false news story.” If enough users flag a story, Facebook wont delete the story from their site, merely offer a warning in the post that the story has been reported by the Facebook community as containing false information, and readers should proceed with caution.
While it could be argued that many of these “fake news stories” are simply satire sites like The Daily Currant profiting off the naivety of Facebook’s extremely young/old/dumb user base, they’re not the target and should remain relatively unaffected. Facebook’s move is an attempt at debunking deliberate — sometimes costly — hoaxes like when 4Chan told iPhone users they could charge their phones by microwaving them, or that iOS 8 made their iPhone waterproof. That sorta thing.
I can’t tell you how many time I’ve, personally, had to be “that guy on the internet” telling friends and family that no, the Foo Fighters aren’t becoming a Christian band, or that an entire Texas town wasn’t, in fact, quarantined due to an Ebola outbreak. This should help make everyone’s lives a little easier on the social network and we applaud Facebook for taking action.
You have a typo, first three words = “From the beginning…” :D
Am I the only one here heavily into tech that doesn’t use FB and doesn’t care 1 bit what happens on it or to it?
Facebook is fun. I like reading about all the idiots in life and their clueless mistakes. It gives me a sense of pleasure to watch them make fools of themselves. Shame… Should have listened when I posted that article about it being false.
I am pretty much stuck using Facebook as its the only way for to me to get in touch with friends and families and its rather annoying most of the time.
i was in that boat for the longest time when i lived 10 hours away. moved home recently and am seriously considering ditching fb altogether now.
I don’t use it, wish it would fucking die. I hate when people even talk about it.
Its part of the reason I stopped using it a few years ago.
So all Fox News articles will now have a warning? :-)
No, just MSNBC and pretty much anything the White House puts out.
So you believe Fox “News”??? ROFL
So I wrote an ethics paper before and my topic was on the media. My gosh, when I saw that court case on Fox News and that couple and Fox won because there is nothing wrong with making up lies for a news article. My lord… I couldn’t do it anymore. I was beyond shocked. Smh… F the media. I’ll read about it myself. I never pay attention when my mom tells me to watch a newscast about something. LoL!!
Honestly? You could have written that ethics paper about any “journalism” company, paper, online, or TV, and you still would have been beyond shocked at how much garbage Fox, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, ABC, CBS, PBS, NYT, NYP, AJC, and Deadspin, among many others, puts out that fools believe.
Every single institution that claims to deliver “news” has an agenda to meet. No matter which side of the political, religious, or global side of the aisle they fall on. All of them are such a joke, they’re no better than the garbage you can see on Comedy Central now where reruns are better than the newly produced content.
This article could / should have stopped at the 9th word and it would have been totally accurate.
So you’re saying even if I do like your page, share your photo, and tell you either where I want to go on your cruise to, what color I want my new car to be, or if I prefer Xbox or PlayStation, that I STILL won’t win crap?
Gee. Thanks a lot.
I see people flagging lots of political articles they don’t like.
fine with me. i think [almost] all politics are a waste of time :P
So they’re introducing a feature that’s actually useful? Well done, Facebook. Well done :P
I already do this by using Facebook very little and believing even less of what I read. It’s a necessary evil.
Similar to my stance regarding FB.
People share articles on it = SKIP
Personal updates (text and photos) at least stand a chance of taking up my time.
Another reason to ditch fb for google+
I have a much better idea: We forge a fake news story that the internet is shutting down on a specific date, then all those who are gullible (stupid) enough to fall for it will leave the interwebz. Fire with fire.
well crap… it’s getting rid of the useful stories… The ones that make iphone users destroy their phone. and there will still be more stupid, “this homeless person walks out and the judges don’t believe what happened next” ugghhh I thought this would be a cool story but no bro it wasn’t it wasn’t a cool story at all.
Can someone please create a facebook app for me that spreads such a fakestory using my account. Then shows me which of my friends report it as false and which don’t.
That would make it easier and less time-consuming to figure out which people are not braindead
EDIT: okay, braindead is a bit much, but you get where I’m going with this
EDIT2: Neither of these edits are actual edits, they were typed together with the original message
The “cracking down on hoaxes” is one aspect of a far more
serious, undiscussable asymmetric national security issue. Facebook’s
worried their social media platform and real-time news feed could be
used to maliciously disseminate decentralized bomb threats, panic-inducing information and phony emergency evacuation orders for large, confined crowds (NFL, NCAA, MLB,
etc.).
Such activity could conceivably result in an “artificially generated
stampede.” Learn more: agsaf.org