Facebook has scrapped an effort to crack down on misinformation on the giant social network by showing “disputed” flags on articles that third-party fact checkers deemed false. The company made the change after academic research suggested that marking a story as false, or “disputed,” can backfire “and further entrench someone’s beliefs.”



After a year of testing and learning, we’re making a change to how we alert people when they see false news on Facebook. Academic research supports the idea that directly surfacing related stories to correct a post containing misinformation can significantly reduce misperceptions. We’ve seen in our own work that Related Articles makes it easier to access fact-checkers’ articles on Facebook.

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Source: [H]ardOCP – Facebook Scraps “Disputed” Flags on “Fake News”