Your Facebook News Feed can be an interesting place. This is where your "serious news" updates sit right alongside photos of your friends' food porn.
But once in a while, you'll see random posts of amazing but true photos that turn out to actually be Photoshopped or confirmations of a totally not confirmed Beyonce pregnancy. At first, you're intrigued by these posts, but then the realization that they're just a bunch of lame hoaxes hits you, and it's not a good feeling at all.
Facebook doesn't want you to experience this anymore, and now the social network is enlisting your help to get rid of those nasty false stories that show up in your News Feed.
Facebook recently added an option to report false stories that pop up in the News Feed. This works the same way as reporting spam on the site. Simply click on a post to hide it, and you can report it as a false news story. People are two times more likely to delete these kinds of posts after they initially post them, according to Facebook. That's probably because all of the Facebook comments on the post saying things like, "Dude. You know this is a hoax, right?" make them feel like idiots.
Now when a lot of people flag a post as false or have chosen to delete it, the post will pop up in News Feeds much less often. When a user does see it in his or her News Feed, it will appear with a message that says many people have reported it.
"The vast majority of publishers on Facebook will not be impacted by this update. A small set of publishers who are frequently posting hoaxes and scams will see their distribution decrease," according to a blog post announcing the update.
People tend to not report humorous or satirical content, according to Facebook, so all of those delightful and rather convincing Onion articles that brighten up your day while simultaneously making you weep for humanity shouldn't be affected.
This update is part of Facebook's more recent efforts to clean up users' News Feeds. As TechCrunch points out, people blame Facebook, not the author or the poster or the website, for what shows up in their News Feeds. That's why it's smart for Facebook to make users' News Feeds as enjoyable as possible so that spammy or hoax-like posts don't make them feel embarrassed and subsequently associate poor experiences with the social network, which translates into them spending much less time there. Past updates to Facebook's News Feed include more nuanced controls of your News Feed and attempts to minimize clickbait.
Now if only Facebook could somehow get rid of hoaxes from the Internet entirely, that would be great.
