Facebook is going to use Snopes and other fact checkers to combat and bury 'fake news'
Facebook is going to use Snopes and other fact checkers
to combat and bury 'fake news'
By Alex Heath December 15, 2016
Facebook is going to start fact checking, labeling, and
burying fake news and hoaxes in the News Feed, the company announced on
Thursday.
The decision comes after Facebook received heated
criticism for its role in spreading a deluge of political misinformation during
the U.S. presidential election, like one story that falsely said the Pope had
endorsed Donald Trump.
To combat fake news, Facebook has partnered with a
shortlist of media organizations, including Snopes and ABC News, that are part
of an international fact-checking network led by Poynter, a nonprofit school
for journalism located in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Starting as a test with a small percentage of its users
in the United States, Facebook will make it easier to report news stories that
are fake or misleading. Once third-party fact checkers have confirmed that the
story is fake, it will be labeled as such and demoted in the News Feed.
A company spokesperson told Business Insider that the
social network will also use other signals, like algorithms that detect whether
a story that appears fake is going viral, to determine if it should label the
story as fake and bury it in peoples' feeds.
"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 organizations," Facebook News
Feed chief Adam Mosseri said in a company blog post on Thursday.
Facebook's new label for fake news.Facebook
A team of Facebook researchers will also review website
domains and send sites that appear to be fake or spoofed (like
"washingtonpost.co") to third-party fact checkers, a Facebook
spokesperson said. Of the 42 news organizations that have committed to Poynter's
fact-checking code of ethics, Facebook is starting out with the following four:
Snopes, Factcheck.org, ABC News, and PolitiFact.
The Associated Press will also be a fact checking
partner.
"We are only involved to the extent that Facebook
relies on the list of signatories to our code of principles as a starting point
for the organizations it chooses to verify," a Poynter spokesperson told
Business Insider. "Facebook is the only organization certifying third
party fact-checkers on its platform."
Facebook has given its four initial fact-checking
partners access to a tool that will let them label stories in the News Feed as
fake, a Facebook spokesperson said. The spokesperson said that Facebook is not
paying the organizations to fact check.
Cracking down on ads for fake news
Facebook users will be able to report stories they think
are fake news.Facebook
The websites that Facebook determines to be fake news
organizations or spoofed domains will also not be able to sell ads on the
social network. Owners of fake news sites can make thousands of dollars per
month through internet ads.
Facebook has repeatedly said that it's not a media
company, but rather an open technology platform that relies on media publishers
and its users to share accurate information.
“We do not think of ourselves as editors," Facebook
head of media partnerships Patrick Walker said during a recent journalism
conference in Dublin. "We believe it’s essential that Facebook stay out of
the business of deciding what issues the world should read about. That’s what
editors do.”
Facebook will show this warning before someone shares a
story that has been labeled as fake.Facebook
Politicians like President Obama and Hillary Clinton have
recently expressed concern about the prevalence of misinformation on social
media, with Obama calling it a "dust cloud of nonsense" and Clinton
calling it "an epidemic."
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has meanwhile gone so far as
to say that it's "pretty crazy" for some to suggest that fake news on
Facebook could have swayed the election in favor of either candidate.
But after facing significant backlash for its denial to
fact check stories on its network, Zuckerberg now calls Facebook a "new
kind of platform" with a responsibility to "build a space where
people can be informed."
"Facebook is a new kind of platform different from
anything before it. I think of Facebook as a technology company, but I
recognize we have a greater responsibility than just building technology that
information flows through," the Facebook founder said in a Thursday post.
"While we don't write the news stories you read and
share, we also recognize we're more than just a distributor of news. We're a
new kind of platform for public discourse -- and that means we have a new kind
of responsibility to enable people to have the most meaningful conversations,
and to build a space where people can be informed."
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