How Crowdsourcing Can Help Facebook Fight Fake News
In recent weeks Facebook has come in for huge criticism across the globe after some users complained that fabricated news stories had influenced the US presidential election.
And now the social media giant has responded with a raft of new features to fight the fake news and hoaxes, and it includes enlisting the help of the crowd.
The new features were announced on Thursday, and in a blog post a company spokesperson said:
“We believe in giving people a voice and that we cannot become arbiters of truth ourselves, so we’re approaching this problem carefully. We’ve focused our efforts on the worst of the worst, on the clear hoaxes spread by spammers for their own gain, and on engaging both our community and third party organization.”
Highlighting Fake News
Users who find fake news pieces in their news feed will be able to flag them as such. The social network has also added a new option to its reporting feature, called “it’s a fake news story”.
There is also going to be a label for “disputed” stories which will be assessed by third party fact-checking organizations (these fact checkers must sign up to a code of principles to take part).
If Facebook users try to share fake news stories they will receive an alert warning stating that the content of the piece has been disputed by third-party fact checkers.
Facebook has also said that stories that turn out to be false after fact-checking would have a link attached to them explaining why.
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