Clickbait and fake news are some of the problems that Facebook is dealing with. The latter basically involves news that is completely untrue, while the former is about creating titles that aren’t necessarily what you might expect from the actual article. Facebook is said to be working on a way to clamp down on fake news, and now it looks like they are also working on clamping down on clickbait titles.
Facebook is asking whether this @PhillyInquirer headline is fake? pic.twitter.com/cCUpwtvQlS
— Chris Krewson (@ckrewson) December 5, 2016
In a recent tweet by Chris Krewson of Philadelphia’s Billy Penn (via TechCrunch), it seems that Facebook has started to ask users to rate the title of articles to help identify posts that might have misleading titles. In the screenshot above posted to Krewson’s Twitter shows that users are asked to rate how misleading an article’s title is. This ranges from “Not at all” to “Completely”.
Facebook has since confirmed to TechCrunch that this is something they’re trying out, but the company did not go into any details as to how it might work, or what they plan to use it for. It is possible that maybe for now Facebook is trying to gather data on language and the way sentences are constructed so that they can create an algorithm that will automatically weed out such articles in the future.
At the moment Facebook is already employing the use of AI to help flag offensive live videos, so to create an algorithm to detect misleading articles doesn’t seem like a stretch.
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