Fake News No More

We all know Fake News has become a huge issue ever since the most recent election, and Facebook is here to tell you that is a thing of the past. Their most recent plan of attack being a new tool on Facebook called "Trust Indicators". The tool was created in collaboration with The Trust project which is an international consortium of news and digital companies. The indicator itself is fairly simple, its basically just a small icon at the bottom of each post that attaches a credible site from which the post received its information. While this seems like a great step towards making news on Facebook more credible it is still faced with several problems. The first one being most people may just overlook the icon to begin with since it is such a small change, but the bigger problem comes from the fact that Facebook has only given 9 news outlets the ability to use this feature so far. The images shown, give a better idea of how the feature actually works. 

If Facebook can expand the number of outlets while continuing to perfect this structure I think this could have a huge impact on the issue at hand. So many of these "Fake News" articles simple comes from ignorant people failing to check their sources. This feature will not only force publishers to be much more aware and honest of the things they are posting, but will also cause consumers of the information to maybe think twice about where they are getting their information from before feeling so strongly about the topic. Information is everywhere these days and yet there are people out there that still refuse to educated themselves before speaking. People develop such strong issues on topics before even fully understanding what it is they are speaking on. The hate has gotten out of control and I think this is a great step towards closing the gap. A lot of the "Fake News" stories have really fueled the fire and getting them back in check could really help get American citizens back all on the same page. It's just like your mother always told you to think before you speak, but it's now more of a check your facts before you attack.