Social media giant, Facebook has announced that it has expanded its fact-checking efforts to 14 more countries. This news was disclosed in a blog post by Tessa Lyons, Facebook’s Product Manager.
Also, fact-checking photos and videos (verifying metadata against the context of the post, examining for any doctored elements) will be introduced to another four countries.
Interestingly, Facebook is going to continue using machine learning and AI to tackle fake news. Specifically, the blog post says that after a French fact checker debunked a story about stroke prevention, Facebook was able to remove some 1,400 duplicate links and over 20 domains spreading the claim. The social network’s fact-checkers will also start utilizing Schema.org’s Claim Review for verification as well.
The next use of AI is further implementing it to “demote foreign pages” that Facebook thinks are likely to spread financially-motivated hoaxes to people in other countries, Think: Nigerian prince-style email scams, but in the form of Facebook pages.
Facebook is also providing an update regarding its academic research partnership to measure the role of social media in elections and democracy in general. The commission is staffing up and “establishing the legal and organizational procedures necessary to becoming fully independent,” Facebook says.
Soon, the commission will launch a website and a request for proposals regarding the spread of fake news and conspiracy theories on Facebook and its effect on users. Said commission is developing privacy-protected datasets with samples of the links people tend to click on across the social network. The idea is for scientists to analyze the links and see what makes people click.
“The effort will never be finished and we have a lot more to do,” the blog post proclaims. Facebook says that its fact-checkers have stopped the spread of stories “rated as false” by around 80 percent.
This is a welcome development as social media is now flooded with news that is unverifiable. This has prompted so the big tech giant to embark on research to find solutions to tackle fake news. We are now gradually seeing the result.
