As I was reading through my Facebook newsfeed, I realized that it’s not just strangers that disseminate fake news; some of my friends were sharing #fakenews too. How can I mark it as such on Facebook?
You raise some very interesting points with your question, actually. The entire concept of fake news is really based on this sort of idealized “objective” news, but if I choose to report and emphasize certain facts while omitting others and you report the same event, but emphasize the opposite, which of us is publishing fake news? If I have a bias and get quotes from attendees who are in alignment with my views, is that fake?
Of course, the egregious stories that are just plain false or that try to impose a conspiracy when there just isn’t one present, those are a different story. Overall, though, we really do need to think pretty closely about what constitutes “real” news and otherwise before we go crazy.
Facebook fake news reporting is similar; should I be able to flag a post as “fake news” simply because I disagree with it or it’s an “inconvenient truth”? That’s kind of how the tools work now, so it’ll be interesting to see how it evolves on Facebook and the Internet overall.
And so, with all of that, let’s have a look at how this all works. To start, here’s a post I saw someone had shared on my Facebook feed that I know is bogus:
Lots of credible news outlets are reporting that it’s an accidental drowning, the coroner report says that, but this person’s sharing something from “Natural News.com”, which itself sounds suspicious. These daft conspiracy theories do no-one any good either. So it’s time to mark this particular post as fake news.
To do that, click on the “•••” button on the top right of this post. A menu shows up with quite a few different choices:
Did you know you could snooze someone for 30 days after they post something particularly egregious, offensive or just stupid? Where was that feature during the last presidential election? 🙂
What we want to choose, however, is highlighted: Hide post. Once you choose that, the post vanishes from your screen directly, replaced with a brief message:
Not very informative, but that’s okay. Choose and click on “Report post“.
This will bring up quite a few options and reasons why a post can be reported to Facebook, though there’s no clarity on exactly what’s going to happen once you do so:
Check that out; you can report a post for being uninteresting. I see lots on Facebook that’s uninteresting, actually. But hold on, let’s stay on task here! Click on the button adjacent to “It’s a false news story” and click “Continue”.
So many choices here – most of which are redundant with earlier options. Not so useful, it’s almost like they’re deliberately making it hard to mark this as a false news or fake news story. See? Those conspiracy theories are hard to shake! 🙂
Choose “Mark this post as false news” and you’ll jump straight to the next step in this rather unnecessarily long journey…
Finally. Done. That’s it. Now it’s hidden from your newsfeed and presumably once enough people report something as false news or fake news on Facebook then it’ll be designated as such for everyone else. In other words, it’s up to us to get involved. Let’s hope that helps.