Facebook seeks to rein the spread of "fake news" by providing publisher details

In the interest of further mitigating the flood of "fake news" and clickbait content on the platform, Facebook is testing out a new feature: an information button that will be displayed alongside content in Facebook's News Feed. This button, which simply looks like an 'i', will display extra details about a given article's publisher. According to Facebook, this information is pulled from the platform itself itself, the publisher's Wikipedia entry (if applicable), and "other sources."

These details include brief descriptions of the publisher themselves -- including their base of operations and a bit of background info -- as well as a list of related articles and a sharing "heat map." This heat map acts as a visual representation of what parts of the world the article is being shared in the most.

While it may not seem like such basic information could contribute much to keeping News Feed free of so-called fake news, Facebook simply sees this as a starting point. With enough user feedback and testing, this feature could be expanded upon in the future.

A side benefit of this change is that some potentially less-reputable news sources (such as brand new websites) might not display any information at all - which can be useful information in and of itself. In Facebook's own words: "...if that information is unavailable, we will let people know, which can also be helpful context."

Ultimately, Facebook hopes this new feature will "provide people (with) some of the tools they need to make an informed decision about which stories to read, share, and trust" without the need to leave the platform.