Facebook is finding a way to diminish false information that are shared or posted in the social media site. Facebook decided to create an two kinds of algorithm machine that would detect fake or hoax news instead of the usual personal reporting from the Facebook users.
After the U.S. presidential elections, Facebook was accused of not filtering fake and malicious news about the president-elect, Donald Trump. "The article's allegation is not true. We did not build and withhold any News Feed changes based on their potential impact on any one political part," Facebook said through TechCrunch concerning the allegations.
Facebook has been taking this issue seriously and they have been deliberating since May on how the social networking site can dispatch fake or hoax news and whether it is the company's responsibility to stop these misleading information. Facebook has been one of the biggest sources of news worldwide especially in the U.S. with over 44% of Americans receiving news from the social networking site.
In a source from Gizmondo, Facebook had thoroughly evaluated their products and policies this year to remove some policies that may look like political biases. Officers with higher positions in Facebook were informed about a goal to update the New Feed that could identify fake or hoax news articles
The sources also revealed that there was an update created before in the Facebook's News Feed concerning the issue but were postponed and was never released to the public. There were no details weather there were malfunctions that caused it to be shelved.
"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." Facebook released this statement in January 2015. "We are not removing stories people report as false and we are not reviewing content and making a determination on its accuracy."