Facebook finally cracks down on fake news

Facebook is finally starting to make good on its promise to fight fake news with technology.

The company introduced a series of updates on Thursday that are aimed at preventing the spread of hoaxes as well as false and misleading news. The changes are part of what Facebook says are still "early experiments" in its efforts to reduce the presence of fake news on the service, and for now they're rolling out only to a small percentage of Facebook users in the U.S.

The experiments include: a new tool that let users flag posts specifically as fake news, labels that show when a story has been marked as "disputed" by a third-party fact-checking organization, changes to the News Feed algorithm, and a crackdown on spammers who spread fake news with the intention of pocketing ad revenue.  Read more...