Facebook testing label for posts in News Feed to fight fake news

Facebook is testing labels for certain posts in a move that it thinks will help fight fake news on the platform. The labels are being tested as users sometimes might confuse satirical content of a social media post to be the reality. To make things clearer, Facebook now wants to label certain posts.

The social networking giant said it is already testing a way to give people more context about the Pages they see. The experiment has started for users in the US.

“We’ll gradually start applying labels including ‘public official,’ ‘fan page’ or ‘satire page’ to posts in News Feed, so people can better understand who they’re coming from,” Facebook said on Wednesday.

As of now, Facebook has not made official why it wants to apply the labels. However, it is not hard to understand why it wants to label satire pages.

This is not the first time Facebook has made an attempt to make the context of posts in the News Feed clearer, as per a report by The Verge. In June last year, it started labelling media outlets that are “wholly or partially under the editorial control of their government”.

According to Facebook, such outlets need labels, because “they combine the influence of a media organisation with the strategic backing of a state, and we believe people should know if the news they read is coming from a publication that may be under the influence of a government”.