Social network company Facebook has taken a series of new measures to crack down on what it calls “fake news” in the UK, as the country prepares for crucial general elections next month.
Facebook said in a statement Tuesday that it had designed new algorithms to detect and remove news articles posted to mislead British voters.
“We’ve found that if reading an article makes people significantly less likely to share it, that may be a sign that a story has misled people in some way,” the statement said.
“In December, we started to test incorporating this signal into ranking, specifically for articles that are outliers, where people who read the article are significantly less likely to share it. We’re now expanding the test to the UK,” it added.
Apparently, Facebook users have been frequently tricked into clickbait posts that featured phrases like “You’ll never guess what happened next…” and “This one trick…” in the headline and returned to their News Feed disappointed.
The new algorithm would allow Facebook to track fake accounts that spread such stories.