Facebook to show fewer hoaxes in news feed
Posted by: Jon Ben-Mayor on 01/21/2015 08:30 AM
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All the hoaxes that pass through your news feed proclaiming various things like; the death of this one, the arrest of that one and of course the many images of bigfoot being spotted at the local gentleman's club will no longer be cluttering up your feed.
According to a post from the Facebook Newsroom, the goal of News Feed is to catch up with your friends and find the things that matter to you. We’re always looking to people on Facebook to tell us how we can improve this experience. We’ve heard from people that they want to see fewer stories that are hoaxes, or misleading news. Today’s update to News Feed reduces the distribution of posts that people have reported as hoaxes and adds an annotation to posts that have received many of these types of reports to warn others on Facebook. We are not removing stories people report as false and we are not reviewing content and making a determination on its accuracy.
What are hoaxes?
Hoaxes are a form of News Feed spam that includes scams (“Click here to win a lifetime supply of coffee”), or deliberately false or misleading news stories (“Man sees dinosaur on hike in Utah”). 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.
Satirical content like The Onion will still fly, and Facebook won’t delete people’s foolishness, but it will show that content to fewer people and display a warning that it might be a sham.
Source: TechCrunch
According to a post from the Facebook Newsroom, the goal of News Feed is to catch up with your friends and find the things that matter to you. We’re always looking to people on Facebook to tell us how we can improve this experience. We’ve heard from people that they want to see fewer stories that are hoaxes, or misleading news. Today’s update to News Feed reduces the distribution of posts that people have reported as hoaxes and adds an annotation to posts that have received many of these types of reports to warn others on Facebook. We are not removing stories people report as false and we are not reviewing content and making a determination on its accuracy.
What are hoaxes?
Hoaxes are a form of News Feed spam that includes scams (“Click here to win a lifetime supply of coffee”), or deliberately false or misleading news stories (“Man sees dinosaur on hike in Utah”). 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.
Satirical content like The Onion will still fly, and Facebook won’t delete people’s foolishness, but it will show that content to fewer people and display a warning that it might be a sham.
Source: TechCrunch
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