Facebook Fake News: 'Disputed Flags' Out, 'Related Articles' In

MENLO PARK, CA — The battle against fake news, which many people believe contributed to the 2016 election of Republican Donald Trump and tilted other elections across the globe, changed course on Thursday as Facebook announced it will no longer flag disputed articles. Instead, the social media titan — which has about 2 billion monthly active users — said it wants to give people similar articles with different information to give readers more "context."

Facebook said academic research indicated flagging disputed articles simply served to entrench users in their own "deeply held beliefs" — the opposite of what it wanted.

"Related Articles, by contrast, are simply designed to give more context, which our research has shown is a more effective way to help people get to the facts," Facebook said in a release. "Indeed, we’ve found that when we show Related Articles next to a false news story, it leads to fewer shares than when the Disputed Flag is shown."

Facebook Product Designer Jeff Smith wrote in a post on Medium that disputed flags also "buried critical information."

"Although the disputed flag alerted someone that fact-checkers disputed the article, it wasn’t easy for people to understand exactly what was false," Smith wrote. "It required too many clicks, and those additional clicks made it harder for people to see what the fact-checkers had said about the disputed story."

The flags were only applied after two fact-checkers deemed an article was false, he said.

Fake news, Facebook said, undermines its ability to meaningfully connect users with their friends and family.

Facebook said that demoting fake news causes articles to lose about 80 percent of their traffic, discouraging "spammers and troll farms" from creating them in the first place.

Additionally, Facebook said it plans to launch a new project aimed at better understanding how people decide whether what they're reading is reliable and accurate based on the news sources they depend upon.

Photo credit: Noah Berger/Associated Press