Facebook to Filter Hoaxes From News Feed

Posted on January 21, 2015

Facebook has announced it will be removing more hoaxes from the news feeds. The social network giant says these misleading stories are annoying Facebook users.

Facebook says hoaxes are type of News Feed spam. They include scams and deliberately false or misleading news stories, such as "Aliens have landed at the White House." Facebook says many of these types of stories will eventually contain comments warning others that the story is a hoax.

Facebook has added an option to report a story as false and says its New Feed algorithm will keep track of how many people flag a story as false. It will also track how many times people delete a post after sharing it and realizing it was a tricky fake news story.

It does seem wise for Facebook to reduce this type of irritating content. It can be a form of trolling and tends to waste people's time. It can also get people upset over nothing if the fake story is about a serious subject matter. PC Magazine has compiled a list of ten fake stories that circulated around the popular social network fooling users. Facebook says satirical content should not be affected.

The image above shows the options people can take when reporting a post on Facebook.