This week Wired ran a very interesting story peeking behind the curtain of Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg. The story tracks the past two years' turmoil of Facebook being increasingly leveraged as a tool to deliver intentionally-divisive content and how Russian agents garnered hundreds of millions of likes and shares for fake articles by simply using Facebook's standard advertising features.
One of Facebook's responses has been to partner with a number of fact-checking entities and provide users with a feature to flag Facebook posts as "fake news". The more times a post is flagged as "fake news", the more likely it will get reviewed by a fact-checking partner.
Unfortunately, the "report fake news" feature is a lot less useful than you might think. Read on to see why...