Facebook Takes Fight Against Fake News To More Countries

Facebook has been hard at work over the past year and a half to combat the fake news problem on its platform. It’s fighting misinformation through a combination of human review and technology. The world’s largest social network has removed fake accounts and has also teamed up with fact-checkers as part of this effort. Acknowledging that this effort will never be finished and that it still has a lot more to do, Facebook today announced that it’s expanding its fight against fake news to 14 new countries.

Facebook is expanding its fact-checking program to new countries as well as its test to fact-check photos and videos. It will increase the impact of fact-checking by using new techniques such as identifying duplicates.

Facebook launched its third-party fact-checking program last spring which it’s now expanding to 14 new countries. It’s planning to scale this to more countries by the end of this year. It’s working with certified, independent fact-checkers who rate the accuracy of stories on Facebook so that the social network can reduce the distribution of stories that are rated as false by an average of 80 percent.

It’s expanding its test to fact-check photos and videos to four countries as well. The test is meant to weed out images and videos that have been manipulated or taken out of context. Facebook is also relying on machine learning to identify duplicates of debunked stories.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Web
Tags: Facebook, fake news