Facebook decided to ditch its “fake news” warnings on articles after the warnings prompted even more users to share the flagged stories, however, the platform has created new features to crack down on what it deems to be “fake news.”
TechCrunch reported that the red “fake news” warnings caused people to share the flagged articles even more, prompting the platform to replace the feature with a “related articles” section instead which provides alternative articles on the subject.
However, Facebook is also adding additional features to crack down on “fake news,” including a system which will make “fake news” links smaller and “real news” links bigger.
“First, rather than call more attention to fake news, Facebook wants to make it easier to miss these stories while scrolling. When Facebook’s third-party fact-checkers verify an article is inaccurate, Facebook will shrink the size of the link post in the News Feed,” TechCrunch explained. “Second, Facebook is now using machine learning to look at newly published articles and scan them for signs of falsehood. Combined with other signals like user reports, Facebook can use high falsehood prediction scores from the machine learning systems to prioritize articles in its queue for fact-checkers. That way, the fact-checkers can spend their time reviewing articles that are already qualified to probably be wrong.”
Despite Facebook’s claims that they are using independent, neutral fact-checkers, these fact-checkers have been proven to hold a left-wing bias.
Politifact is funded by a large Clinton Foundation donor, has previously fact-checked jokes made by Republicans, and rated just over 15 percent of President Trump’s campaign claims as true, while rating 51 percent of Hillary Clinton’s claims as accurate.
Mark Zuckerberg also declared that the Poynter Institute runs fact-checking on Facebook, despite the fact that the institute has links to far-left billionaire George Soros.
Snopes, another fact-checker, fact-checked a joke article from a prominent satire website on Facebook, while their openly far-left employees have previously complained about “white privilege,” described themselves as “progressives,” compared Trump supporters to “ethno-nationalists,” and written articles attacking Donald Trump, Rand Paul, and former Breitbart News Chairman Steve Bannon.
Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington, or like his page at Facebook.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.