Facebook Quietly Begins Fact-Checking Political Photos and Videos
Facebook Quietly Begins Fact-Checking Political Photos
and Videos
By PAULA BOLYARD MARCH 29, 2018
Facebook announced today that the company began
fact-checking political photos and videos on Wednesday in an attempt to root
out fake news. The company announced in a blog post that the changes come as a
result of Facebook's plan to review "ongoing election efforts."
"By now, everyone knows the story: during the 2016
US election, foreign actors tried to undermine the integrity of the electoral
process," Guy Rosen, vice president of product management at Facebook,
wrote. "Their attack included taking advantage of open online platforms —
such as Facebook — to divide Americans, and to spread fear, uncertainty and
doubt." Rosen said although the clock cannot be turned back, "we are
all responsible for making sure the same kind of attack [on] our democracy does
not happen again." He said Facebook is taking its role in the effort
"very, very seriously."
He outlined
several steps Facebook is taking to combat the problem:
First, combating foreign interference,
Second, removing fake accounts,
Third, increasing ads transparency, and
Fourth, reducing the spread of false news.
Alex Stamos, the company's chief security officer, added
to Rosen's remarks by attempting to define fake news. He listed as the most
common issues:
·
Fake identities– this is when an actor conceals
their identity or takes on the identity of another group or individual;
·
Fake audiences– so this is using tricks to
artificially expand the audience or the perception of support for a particular
message;
·
False facts – the assertion of false
information; and
·
False narratives– which are intentionally
divisive headlines and language that exploit disagreements and sow conflict.
This is the most difficult area for us, as different news outlets and consumers
can have completely different views on what an appropriate narrative is even if
they agree on the facts.
Stamos singled out "organized, professional groups"
whose motivation is money. "These cover the spectrum from private but
ideologically motivated groups to full-time employees of state intelligence
services," he said. "Their targets might be foreign or domestic, and
while much of the public discussion has been about countries trying to
influence the debate abroad, we also must be on guard for domestic manipulation
using some of the same techniques."
Facebook product manager Samidh Chakrabarti said the
company has gotten better at finding and deleting fake accounts. "We’re
now at the point that we block millions of fake accounts each day at the point
of creation before they can do any harm," he said. "We’ve been able
to do this thanks to advances in machine learning, which have allowed us to
find suspicious behaviors — without assessing the content itself."
Another produce manager, Tessa Lyons, revealed more
details on how Facebook's partnership with third-party fact-checkers will work:
·
We use signals, including feedback from people
on Facebook, to predict potentially false stories for fact-checkers to review.
·
When fact-checkers rate a story as false, we
significantly reduce its distribution in News Feed — dropping future views on
average by more than 80%.
·
We notify people who’ve shared the story in the
past and warn people who try to share it going forward.
·
For those who still come across the story in
their News Feed, we show more information from fact-checkers in a Related
Articles unit.
·
We use the information from fact-checkers to
train our machine learning model, so that we can catch more potentially false
news stories and do so faster.
The company had previously announced partnerships with
several left-leaning fact-checking organizations, including Snopes and
PolitiFact.
Tucked in near the end of the lengthy blog post, almost
as an afterthought, Lyons revealed that on Wednesday, Facebook began
"fact-checking photos and videos, in addition to links." She said,
"We’re ramping up our fact-checking efforts to fight false news around
elections. We’re scaling in the US and internationally, expanding beyond links
to photos and videos, and increasing transparency."
The company has been on the defensive in recent days
after revelations that political data firm Cambridge Analytica sold information
obtained via Facebook quizzes to third-party vendors, violating the privacy of
millions of Facebook users. Facebook claims that the practice was a violation
of the company's terms of service, but didn't bother to verify that the company
had deleted the information that was collected as required as the terms of
service stipulated. Lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic are calling for
more regulation of Facebook and other social media platforms in the wake of the
scandal.
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