San Francisco, Dec 16: Responding to criticism from all quarters over the spread of fake news, Facebook has asked its users to flag fake news stories which will be
verified by third party fact-checkers.

According to media reports, Facebook was going to work with five fact-checking agencies – ABC News, AP, FactCheck.org, Politifact and Snopes.

Facebook believes in giving people a voice and that it could not become arbiters of truth itself, said Adam Mosseri, vice president of Facebook's News Feed. The social
networking platform was victim of fake news posts during the US presidential election in November.

"We've focused our efforts on the worst of the worst, on the clear hoaxes spread by spammers for their own gain, and on engaging both our community and third party
organisations," Mosseri wrote in a statement on Thursday.

The proliferation of hoax and fake content on its platform apparently significantly affected public opinion during the recently-concluded US political campaign.
Facebook is now looking into four broader areas to address this.

"We're testing several ways to make it easier to report a hoax if you see one on Facebook, which you can do by clicking the upper right hand corner of a post. We've
relied heavily on our community for help on this issue, and this can help us detect more fake new," Mosseri said. "We've started a programme to work with third-party
fact checking organisations that are signatories of Poynter's International Fact Checking Code of Principles. We'll use the reports from our community, along with
other signals, to send stories to these organisations." 

Stories that were disputed may also appear lower in News Feed. Once a story is flagged, it can't be made into an ad and promoted, either.

Facebook has found that a lot of fake news is financially motivated. Spammers make money by masquerading as well-known news organisations, and posting hoaxes that get people to visit to their sites, which are often mostly ads.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently said the company was committed to weed out "the worst of the worst".