Facebook is responding to fake news posts, right in your Facebook feed, by inserting fact checker posts right after posts from your friends that they believe is fake news. If one of your Facebook friends shares an article that Facebook thinks is fake news, then right after that post they will post a fact-checker post. Here is an example of this:
In the screen capture above, you can see that a Facebook friend of mine apparently believed an article that ended up being fake news. They shared the post and it ended up in my Facebook feed. Right after the post, you can see Facebook posting another article, which they commented on, telling you that it’s fake news: and here’s a fact checker article about it.
I personally don’t know what’s worse, though. The fact that Facebook is calling out the fake news and flagging the article this way with a fact-checker article, or them marking it in another way as “fake news”.
All Facebook needs to do, really, is to put a message near the post or maybe even just not show the post at all. But they’re making it so obvious that the article is fake news, they’re making me think differently about the Facebook friend who actually posted the fake news in the first place.
So there may actually be a new idea for content for publishers: perhaps you need to start identifying fake news yourself, add the words “Fact Check:” to the title of your article, and get additional (free?) traffic from Facebook by adding posts that are Fact Checks of fake news.
Now one of the posts that Mark Zuckerberg did back in 2016 talked about what they were doing to combat fake news, but honestly this is the first time (one and a half years later) that I’ve seen this fake news “fact checker” post in action in my news feed. Maybe my Facebook friends arent’t that gullible?