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Facebook Implements “False” Option, You Won’t Believe What Happens Next! (You Will)


January 21, 2015 | Prachi Gupta

You’re going to see fewer Clickbait-y headlines on Facebook. The social media company has followed through on its promise from the summer and announced on Tuesday that it’s giving users the option to report shared content as “false,” meaning that if a headline makes an exclamation and then fails to deliver, you can demote that shit right away.

From Facebook:

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.

The dropdown looks like this:

news-feed-fewer-hoaxes-report-a-story-as-false

But what about satirical content like Clickhole or the Onion? They’re not messing with that:

We’ve found from testing that people tend not to report satirical content intended to be humorous, or content that is clearly labeled as satire. This type of content should not be affected by this update.

So now you if you’re frustrated with fake news, but you’re still screwed if you’re subjected to a fake Facebook page by the DOJ.

(Photo: Facebook)