Social media giant Facebook has released an update to cut down the amount of misleading posts appearing in a user’s News Feed.
Announced today, the update will attempt to show users less posts classified as “hoaxes.” Facebook said stories people have reported as misleading will be less distributed, but they would not be removed.
“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,” Erich Owens, Software Engineer and Udi Weinsberg Research Scientist, said in Facebook’s news release.
The “annotation” will see certain links, photos, videos and status updates accompanied with a warning message notifying users that others have reported it.
Mr Owens said posts that include scams or misleading news are reported two and half times more than others posts, a factor which has led to the adding of a “false news story” option when reporting a post.
“We’ve found from testing that people tend not to report satirical content intended to be humorous, or content that is clearly labelled as satire. This type of content should not be affected by this update,” Mr Owens clarified.
These posts in question will not be reviewed by Facebook, which means the decline of a “hoax” post’s distribution is determined solely upon the amount of users that have reported it.
Businesses with Facebook Pages should be aware that certain posts considered to be fake or deceitful in nature may drive users to report them as such. In other words, it is important that a post’s intention be clear. The less surprises a user finds on the other end of their click, the better.
“The vast majority of publishers on Facebook will not be impacted by this update,” Mr Owen said. “A small set of publishers who are frequently posting hoaxes and scams will see their distribution decrease.”
