Facebook wants users to report 'Fake News'

NEW YORK (FOX5NY) - Facebook is rolling out a feature for its millions of users to report news that they consider fake by hitting a button.

In information that is showing up in user feeds, the social media giant gives tips to spot what it considers to be fake news.

The number one tip is to "be skeptical of headlines".

Facebook now allows users to mark a post as false news.  Facebook says that news stories that are reported as false may be marked as disputed if "independent third-party fact-checkers"  find the story to be false.  Facebook did not say how many reports need to be filed to launch the third-party checks.

This effort is part of a broader plan by Facebook to stop the spread of false news stories on the platform.

If you went on Facebook during the election, you probably noticed a spike in the amount of political news articles on your feed. Some of them were from reputable sites; others were from unrecognizable media sources.

"It's not just that Facebook is a good publishing platform for fake news sites, it's also that this content do a lot better often on news feed," said Alexios Mantezarlis, director of International Fact Checking Network at Poynter. "They go viral because they confirm biases and therefore people like and share them more, increasing their reach."

Facebook's newsfeed, which is designed to show users content that they will most likely engage with, became under scrutiny for not having strict enough policies in place to weed out the fake news sites. Many of those sites were publishing false stories about candidates across both party lines.