Help Facebook flag fake news.

[MineralMan]

If you see fake news, report it. Facebook will be reactive, not proactive on this. The more people who report fake stories, the more likely FB will identify them.

Check stories to see if they're also covered by legitimate news sources. If not, report them.

[notdeplorable]

1. I dunno

What percentage of Breitbart stories are going to be flagged? And will a "disputed" tag even be sufficient? They literally are reposting Trump press releases as news stories:

http://dailycaller.com/2016/12/14/breitbart-straight-up-published-a-trump-press-release/

On a related note, who is going to pay for the crowd of fact-checkers that have to analyze and provide justification for their decisions?

[MineralMan]

2. Well, a press release from a President-elect is news.

Fake news is stuff that is made up and not something officially released, but created more or less out of whole cloth.

Press releases like that one are news. Trump released it. If it wasn't altered, but simply reported as a press release, then it's actually legitimate news.

That's not what FB is looking for. They're looking for bogus stories passed off as truth.

[notdeplorable]

3. Yeah...

I get that examples like Breitbart copy-pasting Trump releases and presenting them as news stories isn't "fake news," but it seems like equally bogus journalism. I could see the Facebook "disputed" tag creeping beyond the narrowest use of the term fake news.

Also will be interesting to see what they do with mainstream peddlers of bad information, like the recent WaPo article on "fake news" that was denounced as McCarthyite "fake news" itself!