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Facebook is tweaking the News Feed to make room for fact checkers
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.
Google will flag fake news stories in search results
Google is taking a stand against dubious and outright 'fake news' by introducing a Fact Check tag in search results. If you ask for information about a highly contested subject, Google will serve a page from a fact-checker site at the top of your results. It's a small breakout box, similar to how Google shows recipes and band discographies. They'll be pulled from publishers like PolitiFact and Snopes, and will show information about the claim, the person who made the claim, and whether they think it's true.
Trump isn't responsible for Sprint bringing 5,000 jobs to the US
President-elect Donald Trump said he was contacted by Sprint executives today and told that the company was making an investment in domestic jobs, according to Reuters and Bloomberg. "Because of what's happening and the spirit and the hope I was just called by the head people at Sprint and they're going to be bringing 5,000 jobs back to the United States," Trump said outside his Mar-A-Lago resort in Florida. "Masa [Son] and some other people were very much involved with that."
Hoaxy visualizes how fake news spreads across social media
We're at the point where the proliferation of fake news online has had extreme offline consequences. While Google has poured funds into battling misinformation and Facebook has asked its users to rate headlines for truthfulness, Indiana University is going about things a different way. Hoaxy, a project from IU's Center for Complex Networks and System Research, is a search engine that tracks the spread of fake news stories, visually.
Fact-check Trump's next tweetstorm as it happens
President-elect Donald Trump is an active Twitter user and has over 17.4 million followers. Those are facts. The contents of his tweets usually aren't. Or they aren't whole truths. As a way of fact checking our nation's next leader's online musings, The Washington Post created a Chrome extension that does just that. Called "RealDonaldContext," it takes his 140-character thoughts and, as the name suggests, gives context to what he's saying.
