Facebook is tweaking the News Feed to make room for fact checkers

They'll populate the area below the news stories your friends share.

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In its own way, Facebook is taking responsibility for the spread of misinformation and changing how its products deliver news. The next phase of that is a test that "might" populate the News Feed with articles related to the one all your friends are sharing. As the GIF below illustrates, there's a box below shared news story and it has a handful of links to articles about the same subject, but from different publishers and even fact checkers. The idea here is to give people more information on a topic before they mash the "share" button.

"That should provide people easier access to additional perspectives and information, including articles by third-party fact-checkers," product manager Sara Su writes in a blog post. This move sounds like Facebook is trying to chip away at the echo chamber that social networks can become while also offering up objective facts related to a politician's wild claims, for example.

Is it going to be effective? That's anyone's guess right now, but it should be easier for Facebook to track than full-page newspaper ads.

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