How to stop getting fake news in your Facebook feed

Remember the woman with the three breasts, external? Or the EU's ban on toasters, external? Or when Donald Trump called Republicans “the dumbest group of voters in the country, external”?

They were all fake stories.

At least in the United States, most people get at least some of their news from Facebook, external. And, by the time of the American presidential election, top articles from fake news pages were outperforming real news on Facebook, external.

That’s a terrible situation for users. Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg has argued in the past that Facebook isn't a media company, so it’s not responsible for it. If Facebook is where we’re getting our information, though, it really matters that so much of what does best in our News Feeds is fake.

A study earlier this year found that top inaccurate posts about the Zika virus were reaching far more users than the most-shared accurate ones, external. During the American election, there were fake stories about the Pope endorsing Donald Trump or the soon-to-be Vice President, Mike Pence, calling Michelle Obama "the most vulgar First Lady we've ever had."

Fake news sites have got really good at gaming Facebook’s news feed algorithm. What you see on your news feed depends, to some extent, on what content gets most engagement: likes, shares and comments. So fake news sites publish the most shocking, crazy and sensational headlines they can think of to get your attention. Most of them don’t believe or necessarily care about whether what they publish is true. They’re just in it for the clicks, so they can sell ads. It’s about making money.

Buzzfeed News found over 100 pro-Trump fake news publishers operating in a single town in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, external(many run by teenagers). They targeted supporters of the President-elect with made-up headlines like, “Proof that Obama was born in Kenya – Trump was right all along”.

Paul Horner, who publishes fake news for a living, recently told Caitlin Dewey of The Washington Post, external, “Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore.”

I head up the International Fact-Checking Network. We train newsrooms, support fact-checking initiatives around the world and showcase best practices in this field.

The global fact-checking community recently signed an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg, external offering to help Facebook deal with the fake news problem.

Facebook announced, external on Friday how it hopes to tackle the scourge of fake news.

In the meantime, there are a few things you can do. Firstly, if you see a headline that seems extreme, take a beat. Read the story. Often the article doesn’t even support the headline. For example, this news story, external about anti-Trump protesters causing a death by blocking an ambulance goes on to say, “This report has not been verified.”

Click on the story and check the URL. Sometimes it will be totally different from the publisher it’s claiming to be, or it will be similar but spelled wrong (like this one, pretending to be ABC News, external).

Run a reverse search, external on the image – it’s really easy. Just drag the picture into the Google search bar and run an image search. A lot of photos aren’t what they claim to be. If the photo is old or inaccurate, there’s a very good chance the article is inaccurate too.

Most of all: don’t like it or share it if it doesn't look quite right. It will only make the problem worse.