Facebook testing a ‘trusted news’ button

Another day, another Facebook feature, right? But this is the latest in the social networking site's attempts to fight fake news, which has been a scourge for the platform and its users.

It is an additional feature that will appear within articles in a user’s News Feed in order to provide context about a story so the reader can make an informed decision as to the story’s trustworthiness.

This new button, which is in testing and not yet rolled out, can be tapped to "easily access additional information [on a story] without needing to go elsewhere," says director of product management Andrew Anker, News Feed product manager Sara Su and product designer Jeff Smith.

Where does this presumably unbiased/fact-checked context come from? Facebook says it is working with journalists from the Facebook Journalism Project as well as pulling materials from Wikipedia and “across Facebook and other sources” in order to rate the trustworthiness of the publisher and/or the story itself.

[ https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/10/news-feed-fyi-new-test-to-provide-context-about-articles/ ]