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Facebook to Try and Kill Fake News Stories

Betty White has died at least half a dozen times on Facebook, so has Hugh Hefner.

Now, the Social Media company says they are going to try and stop fake news stories from getting into Facebook's news feed.

Facebook doesn’t want those to appear in the news feed, so it has added an option for users to report an item in their news feed as false, the company said Tuesday.

If enough people report a piece of content, a notification will be added to it saying “Many people on Facebook have reported that this story contains false information.” Facebook didn’t say how many times an item will have to be flagged to trigger the warning.

Facebook said it won’t remove the posts identified as false. But they’ll likely appear less often in users’ news feeds, in part because users might delete them or share them less frequently.

The effort to screen out fake items isn’t just about keeping people informed. Users can typically spot such hoaxes.

Rather, the initiative is part of Facebook’s effort to make the news feed more useful so users spend more time and come back more often. Facebook calls this packing the feed with “high quality content.”

H/T Wall Street Journal