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Facebook today announced several initiatives to help reduce the spread of fake news, and a major element involves giving fact-checking organizations unprecedented prominence in the News Feed. The largest social network in the world is partnering with organizations that have signed on to the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) fact-checkers’ code of principles to enable them to verify selected links being shared on Facebook and have those fact-checks attached to the original link. This is the first time Facebook has given third parties special placement in the News Feed, which is the biggest single referrer of traffic to news websites in the United States and a huge traffic driver in other parts of the world. This move comes after Facebook faced intense scrutiny for the spread of fake news and misinformation on its platform during the election. “Symbolically, this is huge,” Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the IFCN, told BuzzFeed News when asked about the significance of this partnership for fact-checkers. He also cautioned that “we're going to have to wait and see how the solutions announced by Facebook work in practice and how they are scaled up worldwide to determine what significance this has for fact-checking and the battle against fake news.” Adam Mosseri, the VP of product management for News Feed, told BuzzFeed News Facebook is not paying the checking organizations for their participation, but said their sites could benefit from the additional traffic that this new level of exposure could bring. He also said this and the other new initiatives — which involve a tweak to the News Feed ranking algorithm, easier ways for users to report false content, and new ways to prevent scammers from making money from completely fake news — come in response to concerns about the spread of misinformation on Facebook.

Steve Jennings / Getty Images Adam Mosseri

Facebook is initially focused on attacking “the worst of the worst” of fake news, according to Mosseri. He defined that as “clear hoaxes that are intentionally false and usually spread by spammers for financial gain.” “Fake news is something we have were looking at before the last month or two, but I would say that the urgency around fake news has definitely increased given the feedback we received from the community,” Mosseri told BuzzFeed News. How It Works Here’s how the partnership works and how it will change how some links look in your News Feed: Participating partners will have access to a special online queue that will show links Facebook determined may be suitable for a fact-check. Links can end up in the queue because users have reported them as false, the viral nature of the link warrants a closer look, the source of the link is “masquerading as a news site,” or, for example, a lot of comments say the story is false or misleading. One or multiple partners can fact-check a link. If checkers rate the content of the link as false, the resulting fact-check(s) will be attached to the link in News Feed, thereby alerting users to potential factual issues. So-called disputed links will also have their reach adversely affected in News Feed, according to Mosseri. This is what a disputed piece of content will look like in News Feed:

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