Four third party sites will help check the news on Facebook for hoaxes and spam news. Snopes, FactCheck.org, Politifact, ABC News and AP will help Facebook with this endeavor.
Earlier, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg mentioned the steps the company was taking in order to solve the problem. Four of these have been completed thus far. The necessary steps were to:
- Reduce the amount of fake news
- Make a better detection tool
- Better reporting mechanism
- And better warning labels
Read More: You Can Now Flag Fake News on Facebook
Facebook Following Fact Checking Code
It seems like Facebook has finally made good on its promises. The fact checking services will be following Poynter’s Fact Checking Network fact checker’s code of principles. These principles are:
- Non-partisanship and fairness
- Transparency of sources
- Transparency of funding and organization
- Transparency of methodology
- Open and honest corrections
If the fact checkers confirm that a story is fake, they will report it to a special reporting site built by Facebook for them.
They can also include a link to a post that debunks the fake article. The fake news links will be shown lower in the news feed and will come with a warning label that notes “Disputed by [one or more of the fact checkers]”. The fake posts will also be linked with a debunking post in the News Feed Stories.
It will also stop the users from posting the fake links if they have already been flagged by Facebook as being fake. It will also stop the fake news from being included in its ads as well.
Facebook will be sending the most popular fake news stories to the fact checkers to avoid overloading them. If the news publishers don’t agree with the labels then they will have to take the matter to the fact checkers.
The Fact Checkers Won’t Get Paid
Facebook’s VP of News Feed, Adam Mosseri says that these fact checkers won’t be getting any sort of payment from Facebook. They will instead be getting a higher traffic and a boost in their branding thanks to the debunking posts.
He adds,
We’ve been met with a lot of positivity. What we’re doing, we believe, is aligned wit their mission. I think that it’s going to be very public what they dispute, and it’s going to put them under healthy scrutiny. So If they just start disputing to try to get traffic, people will see what they’re disputing and call them out if there’s any issues…I think there’s checks and balances actually on both sides.
It is now easier to report fake news and can be done by clicking on the top right corner’s drop down menu in the News Feed. Facebook will analyze to see which news posts are least likely to be shared by users and will then rank them lower in the News Feed.
Fake news publisher’s ads will also be checked to see if they lead to ad filled pages. This will lead to less ad revenue for fake news publishers as well.
Via Tech Crunch
In first place why people believe news on social media? when it is being utilized by every one for propaganda purpose top of which are Tahreek e Insaaf, PMLN and @(R)MY.
This is ridiculous. It’s like serving ‘truth’ up on the table, which is unnatural. Moreover, they are trying to treat a symptom rather than the problem. The problem is not fake news, but its demand.