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Facebook has decided to step in and help people avoid the embarrassment of sharing a hoax with their friends on the social network. The company announced today that it is tweaking its News Feed algorithm to recognize fake news stories and cut down on their reach.

The new system will track to see whether people flag a post as false – a feature the company recently added. If enough people do that, Facebook will automatically add a banner above the post that says “Many people on Facebook reported this story has false information.” In addition, the company will track to see how frequently people delete a story after posting it.

news-feed-fewer-hoaxes-report-a-story-as-falseIf those two factors indicate the story was false, Facebook will automatically reduce how much play it gets on other people’s News Feeds. It’s not just links, either: the update will roll out to cover status updates, photos and videos. It’s not clear yet whether this will be used to cut down on the recurring hoax messages people post about protecting their content on Facebook using some arcane (and not at all real) process, but it certainly seems like one application for the new system.

But what about Clickhole, the Onion, and other humorous fake news sites? After all, there are blogs that serve to catalog people on the social network getting duped into thinking satirical stories are actually real. Not to worry, says Facebook: its testing showed “people tend not to report satirical content intended to be humorous, or content that is clearly labeled as satire.” Theoretically, those stories shouldn’t be affected.

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