Facebook’s fight against fake news is actually working. Sort of.

Author: Karissa Bell / Source: Mashable

Facebook’s promise to fight fake news is finally starting to work. Well, sort of. It depends on where you look.

Almost two years after the company vowed to start taking its fake news problem seriously, some of those efforts are beginning to pay off, even if things aren’t moving nearly fast enough for some.

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The social network has introduced a new series called “The Hunt for False News,” which includes specific examples of widely shared fake news on the platform.

It’s partly a status update on the company’s efforts to fight misinformation and partly an effort at instilling a bit more media literacy in users (assuming they think to check Facebook’s official blog posts in the first place). The initial post provides three examples of fake news stories that have made the rounds on Facebook over the last several months:

A story titled “NASA will pay you $100,000 to stay in bed for 60 days!” (Spoiler: they won’t.)
A video captioned “Man from Saudi spits in the face of the poor receptionist at a Hospital in London then attacks other staff.” (The video was old and originated in Kuwait.)
A photo that falsely identified a man as the attacker who stabbed a candidate in Brazil’s upcoming presidential election.

All of the stories were eventually debunked by Facebook’s third-party fact checkers and demoted in News Feed. But not before these items were shared. In the case of the fake story about NASA, the story still “racked up millions of views on Facebook,” before it was debunked.

“We’re getting better at detecting and enforcing against false news, even as perpetrators’ tactics continue to evolve. And while we caught and reduced the distribution of many pieces of misinformation on Facebook this summer, there are still some we miss,” writes Facebook product manager Antonia Woodford.