Facebook starts removing deliberate hoaxes from your News Feed

Facebook, over the last several months, has been working hard on streamlining the News Feed, and making it somewhere that’s not so loud or overbearing. Essentially, Facebook wants you to spend more time within the News Feed and not necessarily hate the experience so much. As a result of that goal, the search giant has recently announced its plan to whittle down the number of hoax articles, or otherwise false pieces, that show up within the News Feed on any given day.

These include click-bait headlines such as “Man sees dinosaur on hike in Utah” and scams offering users, say, a chance to “win a lifetime supply of coffee,” if only you’d be so kind as to follow the link, please.

Facebook found that people are two times more likely to delete these types of posts after receiving a comment from a friend warning them they were duped.

“Recently, we added an option for people to report a story they see in News Feed as false. This works in the same way as reporting a story as spam. When you click to hide a story you also have the option to report the content. Stories that include scams, or deliberately misleading news, are reported two and a half times more often than links to other news stories.“

“This update will apply to posts including links, photos, videos and status updates,” explained the firm, adding that posts that receive lots of reports will be “annotated with a message warning people that many others on Facebook have reported it.” 

So to be clear, Facebook is not removing stories others report as false nor is it reviewing any such submission. What they’re doing is flagging hoax stories to warn others while reducing their frequency in the News Feed.

What do you think ?

[via Facebook]