Popular social media platform Instagram is striving hard to kick fake news and misinformation off its platform. The Facebook-owned company has added an option that will allow users to report posts that they think are fake.
The reported images will be fact-checked by professional fact-checkers following International Fact-Checking Network’s Code of Principles. Once a reported image is fact-checked and found to be misleading or false, it will not get deleted from the platform. Instead, the reported image will not be visible on the Explore feed of Instagram and won’t make its way to Instagram hashtags.
“In Facebook, posts become popular by shares. On Instagram, people use multiple hashtags to promote their pieces of content and have them showing up on many different pages. This is where we will be working on,” said Stephanie Otway, a Facebook spokeswoman.
This statement indeed is true as people tend to add a lot of hashtags in the caption of posts to increase the reach of the image which in turn results in people following those respective hashtags getting an irrelevant post on their feed.
To report a fake post, all you have to do is tap on the vertical three dots found on the top right of every post and select “Report”. From the Report menu that appears now, choose “It’s inappropriate”. You will get a list of reasons for reporting the post. Find “False Information” from the list and tap on it.
“This is an initial step as we work toward a more comprehensive approach to tackling misinformation,” said Otway.
As of now, only US-based fact-checkers will be involved in the program but that will change in a later stage as false information is one of the issues the company is working to eliminate in its platform.
So, will you consider reporting false information when you see one? Let us know in the comments.
