RantCrush

RantCrush Top 5: December 16, 2016

By Rant Crush | December 16, 2016

Happy Friday everyone! Last night, Trevor Noah came up with a pretty good summary of the year, saying: “2016 started with Zika and then turned bad.” But satire is the best medicine, so watching Noah’s clip could help. Hope you have a great weekend and see you on Monday! Welcome to RantCrush Top 5, where we take you through today’s top five controversial stories in the world of law and policy. Who’s ranting and raving right now? Check it out below:

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Facebook Makes an Effort to Fight Fake News

After being criticized for not preventing fake news stories from trending on people’s newsfeeds, Facebook recently announced a new strategy to deal with the problem. The company has some new tools that will make it easier for users to flag fake news and it will collaborate with a respected journalistic organization, the Poynter Institute, to investigate the stories that people report. This means FB will rely more on what you, as a user, report and flag. Once someone has flagged a post, Poynter will investigate it. If a story is determined to be fake, it will still be on Facebook, but marked as “disputed” and it will rank lower on users’ news feeds.

Fake news became a big problem during the 2016 election, and in a survey released yesterday, two-thirds of the respondents said that fake news stories have confused them about facts and current events. The question is, will the new FB initiative help the problem?