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January 21, 2015

Facebook aims to cut down hoax, misleading posts

By NOW Marketing Group
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In case you missed it Tuesday, Facebook took a big step in trying to cut down on the scam contests or false news stories that show up in our News Feeds and drive users crazy.

According to Facebook’s newsroom blog, the social media giant has been inundated with complaints from users that they want to see less hoax contest posts or “misleading news” stories.

So on Tuesday, Facebook updated its News Feed in an effort to reduce posts that are reported as hoaxes by alerting their users. The article states that to reduce the amount of these posts, News Feed will “take into account when many people flag a post a post as false. News Feed will also take into account when many people choose to delete posts.”

The result will be that if an article as been reported as a hoax or deleted it will be reduced in the overall News Feed. This applies to any posts with links, photos, videos and status updates.

“Posts that receive lots of reports will be annotated with a message warning people that many others on Facebook have reported it,” the article states.

If you haven’t run in to these you’re lucky. Essentially, what Facebook defines these posts as any that con users into jumping into competitions, or provide the users with misleading news. Basically, these hoaxes are considered “News Feed spam” and once the fake contests – such as “click here and win an iPad” – or a false news story – Bigfoot spotted in Cleveland – to entice people to share the post.

What Facebook has found is that often after the post is shared, friends tend to make many comments on the post stating it is a fraud. These friends will also investigate and find sites or stories that bust the story or contest as fake.

This leads to the original “sharer” deleting the post, more times than not (according to Facebook, two times as likely), which pushed Facebook to realize its users often didn’t know they were being duped.

Facebook users are able to flag stories and contests because of a recent update that allows them to do so.

According to an article in Fast Company, this change is only a signal Facebook is using to cut down on these false stories and scams because it recognizes some malicious users may try to mark actual stories or contests as a way to hide them from the public, for whatever reason.

The article quotes a Facebook representative as saying, "News Feed looks at lots of info about a post when determining where it should show up in News Feed, including both positive and negative feedback. Reporting a story as 'false' is another negative signal, similar to reporting a post as spam. Using a range of signals in ranking helps guard against abuse."

One reason Facebook is working to get rid of fake news stories is a recent hack on Twitter in which the New York Post spit out a ton of fake news stories. Twitter has no such way of marking posts and alerting its users to fraudulent material.

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Tags: Social Media Marketing, Facebook

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