Facebook's Battle Against Fake News

One of the newest issues on social media platforms is the prevalence of falsified or embellished news stories. There are a multitude of websites that make a profit off creating and publishing false news stories. Facebook has introduced a new tool in hopes of combatting this issue and helping its users differentiate between fantasy and reality.

This tool is know as "Trust Indicators". This was designed in collaboration with the Trust Project, which is an international association of businesses who aim to build a more trustworthy press. This "trust indicator" shows itself as a tiny "i" next to articles that appear in the News Feed, which users can click on to find more information on where the story originated. Publishers can include their ethics and corrections policies as well as their organizational structure in hope to prove validity to readers.

Facebook is hoping that users will engage and read through these policies to determine for themselves whether news articles are truthful. There are a few roadblocks to this, though: 1) this is a lot of work for users, who mindlessly scroll through Facebook and are too lazy to read through legal jargon just to determine if an article has been fact-checked. 2) Not every publisher has access to this tool-- Facebook has hand-picked a select group of news outlets to be included.

Many think that Facebook isn't doing enough to combat the issue of false news stories, and that this tool isn't an adequate solution.

Is this a tool you would use to fact-check every article you read on Facebook?