Facebook and Twitter tackle spam and fake news

“Our research further shows that the links they share tend to include low-quality content such as click bait, sensationalism, and misinformation. We are making an update to help reduce low-quality links in News Feed… We want to reduce the influence of these spammers and deprioritise the links they share more frequently than regular shares. 

This update will only apply to links, such as an individual article, not to domains, Pages, videos, photos, check-ins or status updates. Publishers that get meaningful distribution from people who routinely share vast amounts of public posts per day may see a reduction in the distribution of those specific links,” said Adam Mosseri, Vice President, News Feed, in a blog post late on Friday. 

In March, the company had rolled out a tool that lets users flag content they think might be false by clicking a tab to dispute it. If enough people click “dispute,” the story is sent to independent fact checkers that Facebook has partnered with. 

Meanwhile, Twitter is also exploring adding a feature that would let users flag tweets that contain misleading, false or harmful information, according to two people familiar with the company’s projects. The feature, which is still in a prototype phase, could look like a tiny tab appearing in a dropdown menu alongside tweets, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release details of the effort. 

However, Twitter spokeswoman Emily Horne said the company had “no current plans to launch” the feature but said she would not comment on whether it was being tested. “There are no current plans to launch any type of product along these lines,” she said. 

Given the sheer scale of social media, curtailing this type of abuse is a formidable challenge even for wealthy tech companies. Twitter has more than 300 million monthly users, and Facebook announced earlier this week that it reached 2 billion users. There is also a fine line between abuse and free speech, and between false and sensational content, and technology companies have struggled to define the problem.  

“We, as a company, should not be the arbiter of truth,” Vice President of Policy Colin Crowell said in a blog post earlier this month. He emphasized that Twitter users — “journalists, experts, and engaged citizens” — tweet side by side to correct public discourse every day in real time.