The WA Liberal Party is encouraging people to report Labor Facebook posts it says are "fake or misleading" ahead of the March state election, in a tactic social media experts say could backfire.

The Liberals published a five-step explainer titled How To Report A Fake Story on their website on Monday, asking for help to "report Labor lies".

It said Labor had lied about Liberal policy on several issues including skilled migration and power prices and had promoted "fake and misleading news" as part of its "scare campaign".

The Liberals website includes detailed instructions on how to report the posts to Facebook as "inappropriate, annoying or not funny" in a bid to get it removed from the social media site.

A Liberal spokesperson defended the tactic as a legitimate way to combat "Labor lies".

"Mark McGowan and Labor take a sneaky approach to politics and by empowering the public to report these Labor lies we can try and help people keep Labor honest," the spokesperson said in a statement.

But social media strategist Ruth Callaghan said using the term "fake news" was risky and an escalation of the usual campaign tactic of parties accusing one another of lying.

"Fake news is a real problem and a genuine threat, but it is also a phrase that has gone from almost no use to being used so widely it risks losing its meaning," she said.

"Fake news really refers to deliberately created, manipulative stories that bear no relationship to reality — things such as claims during the US presidential campaign that an FBI agent linked to the leak of Hillary Clinton's emails was found dead in an apparent murder suicide.

"That story came from a fictitious newspaper, set in a town that doesn't exist, quoting people who were made up, and it was still shared on Facebook more than half a million times."

Ms Callaghan said people had a high level of distrust in the media and politicians, and pushing a fake news agenda could backfire.

"Facebook's community standards are designed to protect people from posts with things like nudity, threats, hate speech and criminal activity and Facebook specifically says that it doesn't care how often a post is reported when deciding whether to remove it," she said.

"If a post is not in breach of its community standards — and there's nothing in there about political disagreements — it probably won't be removed.

"But Facebook is also not likely to tackle the real problem of fake news if anyone can use a report that a competitor's posts are fake as a way of censoring their message.

"So it makes it less likely they will develop techniques to stop what is really fake and really damaging."

The WA Liberal Party's website encourages people to report Labor Facebook posts as "fake stories". ( Supplied: waliberal.org.au )

'Crossing a line'

University of Western Australia marketing professor Paul Harrigan said it seemed an overly defensive move by the Liberal party.

"It's not fake news, but that's what they're treating it as and it's crossing a line really beyond political argument," he said.

"They're kind of amplifying the trend by calling something fake that really isn't."

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Dr Harrigan said he did not think it was a particularly wise way to run an election campaign.

"Both parties want to be seen as transparent and genuine on social media, [but] social media users don't really take too well to being told what to do," he said.

"Social media is a forum where you have to have a positive spin because if you go negative, then people go negative back at you, and there is no way to win that."

ALP state secretary Patrick Gorman said the Government was running the most negative campaign WA had ever seen.

"The Liberals' campaign has been lazy, reactive, and flat footed; their scramble on this issue is just the latest example of their incompetence," he said.