Mission to Mitigate: Your Guide on Reporting Procedures
Welcome back to Allegiance Against Misinformation!
Following on from our last post we decided that it is so important to highlight that there are ways to report false posts on social media.
We are fully committed to providing the tools for you to recognise misinformation and to then be able to help us mitigate this issue by reporting these posts to the social platforms you are using. You guys are vital to our mission to mitigate and we hope this can help you get the most out of social media and its uses as it is a positive invention that will only become bigger before its usage declines.
Facebook has used its resources to make people aware of the risks of misinformation and admitting that it does appear on their platform. Facebook has been at the heart of fake news scandals including Russian interference with the 2016 Presidential Election, the Covid-19 Vaccine and Brexit. Facebook have a dedicated page to fake news and misinformation where you will find tips on spotting it and reporting it. You will find this resource using the following link:
But we will summarise the reporting process for you here. When you see a post that you suspect to contain false information you can report it by:
Clicking the three dot icon (…) which you will find right beside the post in the upper right hand corner
You then want to select Report post
Next you will need to select the option ‘False Information’
Finally submit
It really is that easy but it also helps to mitigate the issue by highlighting the posts to the social platforms!
Instagram and Facebook are both under the META group and therefore have the same reporting procedure. The only difference is the positioning of the three dot icon. Like Facebook, Instagram has a page dedicated to reducing the spread of false information which you can access with the following link:
The page talks about how Instagram uses third-party fact-checkers and uses labels on posts they feel are misinforming people. It is worth a read and we would encourage you to have a look.
Twitter allows you to report tweets, lists, individual direct messages and direct message conversations.
To report a tweet, you will have to:
o Select the three dots on the right hand corner
o Select Report Tweet
o Start Report
o Then select who you want to make the report for – we suggest selecting everyone on Twitter
o Select spammed (posting malicious links, misusing hashtags, fake engagement, repetitive replies, Retweets or Direct Messages) as the reason for the report
o Then it will give you a list of options to choose from for more information
You can find a guide to all of Twitter’s reporting procedures here using this link:
These are not the only sites that misinformation and disinformation are spread across but they are the most likely candidates. The World Health Orgainsation has created a webpage with information on how to report false information on a lot of social platforms not mentioned in this blog including YouTube, Linkedln and TikTok. For more information please visit:
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