Fake news have ravaged the world for a long time now. This coupled with the fact that the world is now a global village with such fluid transfer of information regardless of distance, makes transmission of fake news so easy. All it takes to go viral is to generate headlines so artificial yet very interesting and before you know it such headlines are flying all around the world as real news. But Facebook is clamping down on this.
Facebook has rolled out a stretch of defenses against fake news. With the new structure in place, once Facebook’s security team indicts you of sharing fake stories many times, such page would be shut down from advertising on the giant social media platform. Facebook is able to put these prohibitive steps in place against fake news by means of third-party fact-checking bodies. With this, Facebook is able to tell if your story is false or not. With the already existing rules in Facebook, advertisers are disallowed from running ads associated with fake news. But this new step makes Facebook’s tolerance for fake news thinner.
Via means of a blog post, Facebook announced that it is clasping down on fake news saying “instances of Pages using Facebook ads to build their audiences in order to distribute false news more broadly.” Fake news can now keep a good distance from monetized pages. Once banned if the page shows repentance and stops running ads, Facebook may pardon it and allow it run ads again.
