Rise of Fake News in Social Media Platforms

By | January 1, 2020

Social media platforms are used by the majority of the people around the globe for different reasons. Just like most of us get educated with all the latest news happening around the globe.

Due to that, there are several fake news surfacing on different social media platforms. Facebook is the most used social media platform for spreading false news in their news feed. In this article, we will talk about the rise of fake news on social media platforms and their solutions.

fake news on social media

Misleading and fake news in social media platforms:

Due to the rise of fake news on Facebook, they were using a feature called ‘Disputed Flags’ in order to report them. Later on, it was discontinued and several related articles were shown below the post in order to have a clear idea about the misinformation.

Mostly fake news are the best clickbait articles which is much needed for increasing engagement on Facebook. There is an alternative way where you can buy Facebook views, instead of flooding social media platforms with false news.

The new feature offered by Facebook will give you all the related articles next to that particular post, which will help you to get more information regarding that particular topic.

Even WhatsApp recently removed their quick forward feature in order to limit the sharing option up to 5 contacts at a time. Facebook is also offering a ‘Fact Checker’ feature, which will provide a badge beside every article as “Fact Checked” to confirm them as genuine.

This particular feature is basically focused on providing correct information and to avoid all the misinformation which is spreading in the platform. Even every article will have two fact-checker reviews, which will even increase the speed of the clarification process.

According to several kinds of researches, Facebook has confirmed that most of the false news is financially motivated and used mostly to force users to click on the website. As a penalty for spreading false news, Facebook is demoting the post by restricting their total traffic to 20%.

Also, Facebook will remove the advertising option of that particular account or page for spreading false news across the platform. WhatsApp is rather taking a drastic step by banning those account permanently.

Whereas Twitter and Instagram are far less used for spreading false news across the globe. Facebook will restrict the monetization and also reduce the distribution of those particular accounts in order to trim down the false news. Facebook is even offering the users to check the information and understand by cross-checking with the genuine news sources.

Still, it is unsure that this procedure will genuinely decrease the chance of spreading false news. It is entirely depending on how fact-checker feature works in terms of providing a general source of information.

Users can report any post in order to have its fact-checked, in case any allegation or false news is reported. This feature will be available for every user soon after the testing phase is completed. Even a few of the Facebook pages have experienced low traffic due to unknown reasons, which is due to the testing phase of the fact-checker feature. Mostly false news is spread on political grounds which can be a major negative effect on any country.

Conclusion:

Misleading news can be problematic for many reasons and it needs to be controlled in order to avoid negative effects. We have collected complete information regarding the spread of false news around several social media networks and posted them in this article for you. Share this article with others, so that they get to know about the problems that false news is causing in social media platforms.

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