No, but it would be good to flag them in some way. For instance, to display the text in red, and have an icon to warn that it is a fake news site.

There are many sites that actually declare that they are fake sites in their “About” page. There are others that post only fake news but don’t say so.

Others are unreliable and sensationalist, such as the British “red top tabloids” which often exaggerate or produce out and out hoax stories and often don’t check their facts at all in science stories but just run them based on hearsay, youtube videos or something they read in another paper. They do no more fact checking than a facebook friend who shares a link they find striking, and often embellish the stories as well.

I think we can rely on quora answers to deal with much of this but that it would help a lot if the out and out fake sites, the satirical ones, and the sensationalist ones were flagged in some way.

I suggest that as you paste the url into your answer - that when quora fetches the text for the url that it gets automatically coloured red if it is a fake or satirical or sensationalist site. Possibly with a gradation of colours depending on the type, maybe an icon. Also to have an option for the author of the answer or question to select one of those options to colour the url when they share a link they know to be fake which Quora hasn’t highlighted yet, or indeed to remove the colour when they know it is genuine if they think Quora has made a mistake. Maybe it is a site that usually publishes fake news but in this one instance has actually published something accurate and good.

So leave the control with authors of questions and answers, but flag the sites clearly.

As a starting point, they can use the lists here Here are all the fake 'news' sites to watch out for on Facebook by Melissa Zimdars, a media professor at Merrimack College in Massachusetts, and List of satirical news websites - Wikipedia

I think a similar system would work well for facebook too. After all the satirical sites like the Onion especially can be fun to share so long as everyone knows it is satirical, some out and out over the top story that pokes fun at journalist excesses, for instance. Also how can you debunk them if they can’t be shared?

So I don’t think they should be prohibited, here or on facebook. Just flagged in some easy to recognize way.

Perhaps also - could have an option to disable this flagging? If there is anyone who prefers not to know if it is fake… Is there? I think that on April 1st some might like to be fooled for a short while. Do you label April Fool stories as “April Fool”? That might be a gray area. But I think nobody probably likes to be fooled permanently though.