San Francisco — Facebook says it will stop showing "disputed" flags on news that third-party fact checkers mark as false — a system it has started earlier this year to try to curb the spread of fake news on the site. Instead, the social network will show related articles to try to give more context to the potentially false story. Facebook is changing its response to fake news because academic research has shown that marking a story as false may "entrench deeply held beliefs", the company said in a statement. Facebook, with more than 2-billion average monthly users, has been criticised along with Twitter and Google’s YouTube for letting misinformation spread across their platforms, including an effort by Russian operatives to influence last year’s US presidential election. The company, among a variety of responses, has altered its algorithm for the news feed to punish sites that use inflammatory language associated with fake news and tried to reward higher quality content. Facebook w...
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