I posted this on the 11th of November on FB after being bombarded with fake posts. I had a couple of beers.
News from social media are not always correct...People should be held accountable for false or manipulative reporting or sharing such articles which are not from an organisation which is registered to proper authorities where they can be held accountable. News agencies can register with Facebook and their stories can be shared. Facebook can charge a fee to these agencies annually. If for example someone posts a fake news and it gets reported negatively by any user. If not registered with Facebook....will disappear. But from a registered organisation even if false will be posted. Hence news organisation will be held accountable if fake. So people can share news from credible news organisations within Facebook. Facebook can become a great source of news. A simple algorithm can be incorporated to cater this. Of course I may have missed some details so please comment.

This 'fake news' thing is beginning to take on an air of mass hysteria.
Say some guy you don't know very well comes up to you and says "OMG!!! Did you hear about..(blah, blah, blah).!!!" Do you just accept it and start Tweeting frantically, trying to be the first person in your social group to 'have the inside gen'? Not if you aren't some sort of half-wit lemming you don't! You would check out the story and do your 'due diligence' lest it turns out to be complete twaddle and you end up looking a twit! So, why don't we all do this when we hear about some fantastic story that plops into our email in-tray or that we read in some stupid 'lifestyle magazine, or tweet etc?
Time to just all simmer down a bit and read some decent news sources - if there are any left. BBC? I'm not even sure about them anymore but at least they don't have to rely on click-bait and advertising revenue to exist - unlike possibly *any* other news source on the planet.
In short - get a grip!

I am middle of the road politically but I think censorship inherently favors left leaning views. It's simply less offensive to say "I think we should be helping all people in the world in need of help" than it is to say "We should look out for our own citizens first even if that means neglecting people in other regions of the world". There are lots of people in both camps but you rarely see celebrities and public figures come out in support of right leaning views. The fact is that it's really hard to attack an individual for saying "we should help all people in the world" as a terrible person but that's not always possible to do and hard choices sometimes have to be made. The problem with censorship is that it tends to be enforced more heavily against more offensive views and less so against less offensive views but who is right isn't always determined by which persons views were less offensive. The idea that Mike Brown had his hands up and the officer just murdered him execution style was the biggest fake news story in the US that I know of recently and even after the facts were well known many on the left including media refused to call it false. There was evidence supporting the truth available from the beginning but it was the truth that was censored on reddit and social media because people found it offensive. The less offensive opinion isn't necessarily the right one and because of that censorship will ALWAYS be applied unequally.

@Martin Winlow - You are making a dangerous an incorrect assumption in your post here. You are assuming that the majority of people who use the internet and social media in particular exit the application and voluntarily perform a "fact check" of "due diligence". Outside of the academic world I've seen near zero people who do that. So the hysteria over fake news is not uncalled for, if for no other reason than to make the masses aware that they MUST fact check EVERYTHING they see. Then there are supposedly reputable sources that are completely fabricating events like "The Bowling Greene Massacre" that never even happened. At that point how can an ordinary person even distinguish reality from fakers?

"Post-Naive Era" would be more appropriate than "Post-Trust Era". People have to learn for themselves how to judge honesty.

I think this article totally misses the real problem. This is a moral crisis. If you have definite beliefs about what is right and wrong, then you understand what real truth is. If you have no definite moral compass, then any story that benefits your cause is easily accepted as the truth and anything that offends you must be a lie and needs to be censored. Traditionally, the laws and truth were based on the "Ten Commandments" rather than man's individual interpretation of what is right and wrong. Once man forsakes the Ten Commandments, he is on a slippery slope downward towards the lowest common level. If lying is to man's advantage then he will lie. Without an absolute moral authority, there will be no solution.

CNN and many other MSM outlets are the main propagators of "fake news". I'm a young guy, but I'm sure it's been going on a while. This past summer is when I first experienced first-hand how deep this thing goes. I was shadow-banned on facebook for sharing r/the_donald, unreddit, and wikileaks information. I also had multiple accounts on reddit banned for sharing links to unreddit (it allows you to see what comments have been deleted). We have reddit working with an intelligence company called Stratfor, who was working for the Clinton Foundation. We had a thing called "correct the record" (CTR) which was a super PAC hired by Clinton (this isn't just about her: it's about people with money/power exerting influence on the news) to vote/downvote, and promote or obscure news based on its favorability (or harm) to a particular organization/individual.
We had CNN colluding with the DNC, giving out questions to one side in a debate, and I'm sure more that hasn't been exposed. We had CNN tell us outright that "reading the wikileaks is illegal...[for citizens], as well as planting their own crew to act as protesters.
We had most of the MSM, (including NPR!! -whom I used to trust!) artfully, tactically publishing certain stories while holding back others. This summer was mind-blowing for me. We bobbing around in an ocean of agendas...I now only trust the raw facts, and I attempt to be exposed to them from the everyday people that saw it/heard it/said it, etc, not through the filter of some agenda-(or money)-driven organization. Bunch of liars.

Having users flag messages as fake news is a terrible idea. Nothing to keep people from flagging posts, political or otherwise, as "fake" just because they don't agree and want to try and get the article removed. Or maybe they honestly believe the articles are fake. An article was recently published and was on FaceBook that the debate over GMOs is over...they are harmless and they have proof. Great... but how many "anti-GMOers" are going to read that and flag it as "fake".
If you're going to let end users "flag" news as "fake"...no designation should be noted on the post until it's determined to be such.

The solution may be to certify journalists in much the same way as other professionals are certified. As it is, readers have no way to judge the qualifications of the writer. They would have to be accountable to their peers in much the same way as lawyers and doctors. It's not perfect, but better than what we have.

I'd be for the concept of fact-checkers on facebook if I had the freedom to choose which fact-checker I subscribe to or to even be one myself that others could subscribe to. I don't like the idea of anyone other than the user choosing what reports get out either directly or by proxy, but certainly NOT by a third party, not chosen by the user, who often has different ideas of what is true or good than the user's.