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Facebook Ditches Its “Fake News Flag” After People Shared Flagged Articles Even More

Facebook Ditches Its “Fake News Flag” After People Shared Flagged Articles Even More

Roughly one year ago Facebook promised to eradicate “fake news” from its platform by “flagging” articles that were deemed inaccurate by their hand-selected “fact checkers” (A.K.A. “liberal propagandists”)…we wrote all about it in a post entitled “Facebook Launches Campaign To Combat ‘Fake News’“.

Among other things, the crusade attempted to dissuade people from sharing certain content, like the $100,000 of Russia ads that apparently changed the course of human history, by shaming them with a big red caution flag underneath their post.  Per The Telegraph, it looked something like this:

Unfortunately, after a year of trials, it seems that Facebook users were not shamed by Zuckerberg’s ‘scarlet letter’ but actually wore it as a badge of honor and shared those articles even more than they otherwise would have…oops.

Facebook is getting rid of its fake news red flags because they were making fabricated media reports appear more believable to its users.

The U-turn was prompted by research suggesting users would actually believe fake news even if it was flagged as incorrect or a misleading.

“Academic research on correcting misinformation has shown that putting a strong image, like a red flag, next to an article may actually entrench deeply held beliefs – the opposite effect to what we intended,” Facebook product manager Tessa Lyons wrote in a blog-post.

As a result, Facebook is ditching the “fake news flag” and instead force feeding users articles that more closely align with Zuckerberg’s political beliefs before allowing them to share articles that have been deemed ‘inconvenient’ for one reason or another.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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