Facebook to step up fact-checking in fight against fake news

The company said in a statement on its website it will startusing updated machine learning to detect possible hoaxes andsend them to fact checkers, potentially showing fact-checkingresults under the original article.

It's a further roll out of testing started in April.

Facebook has been criticized as being one of the maindistribution points for so-called fake news, which many thinkinfluenced the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The issue has also become a big political topic in Europe,with French voters deluged with false stories ahead of thepresidential election in May and Germany backing a plan to finesocial media networks if they fail to remove hateful postingspromptly, ahead of elections there in September.

On Thursday Facebook said in a separate statement in Germanthat a test of the new fact-checking feature was being launchedin the United States, France, the Netherlands and Germany.

"In addition to seeing which stories are disputed bythird-party fact checkers, people want more context to makeinformed decisions about what they read and share," said SaraSu, Facebook news feed product manager, in a blog.

She added that Facebook would keep testing its "relatedarticle" feature, which suggests additional articles on the same topic from different viewpoints or outlets, and work on other changes to its news feed tocut down on false news.