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Facebook launches attack on fake news with a new feature
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Facebook launches attack on fake news with a new feature

Facebook announced Thursday that it is launching a new feature called Trust Indicators, which will help users to determine which news articles performing on the platform are legitimate stories.

How's this going to work?

According to Facebook, only certain articles during a test period will have these Trust Indicators attached to them in order to provide information on the articles' publishers. Information on the publishers will include the publisher's policies with regard to corrections, ethics, fact-checking, ownership structure, and masthead.

Publishers will have to manually upload this information to the Brand Asset Library under Facebook's publishing tools.

Facebook is partnering with The Trust Project — an "international consortium of news and digital companies collaborating to build a more trustworthy and trusted press" — to bring the tool to the social networking site. Thursday will see Facebook testing the Trust Indicators through a module that was established by The Trust Project.

What is Facebook saying about the move?

"We believe that helping people access this important contextual information can help them evaluate if articles are from a publisher they trust, and if the story itself is credible," product manager Andrew Anker wrote.

"This step is part of our larger efforts to combat false news and misinformation on Facebook," he added, "providing people with more context to help them make more informed decisions, advance news literacy and education, and working to reinforce indicators of publisher integrity on our platform."

Anker noted that the reason Facebook decided to implement the Trust Indicators was to "enhance people's understanding of the sources and trustworthiness of news" on Facebook.

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