Tech

FaceBook's Fake News Fixing Plan: VP Reveals Details, Third Party Fact Finding Companies To Check News

Hemal Vora
First Posted: Dec 17, 2016 04:50 AM EST

Fake news on FaceBook has been making a lot of buzz, lately. There are some serious allegations Fake news has influenced the outcome of U.S elections. To protect its image, FaceBook is coming up with a plan and it surely looks like, it will remove the menace.

Facebook VP Reveal The Company's Fack News Fixing Plan

Facebook recently revealed details on its plans to get rid of the fake news fiasco that it has been facing lately especially, after allegations of misleading users during the US presidential elections. In a recent post, the Facebook Vice-President Adam Mosseri has expressed that the social media giant is trying to introduce easy methods to report hoaxes and that the company had already started working with various third-party fact-checking firms, as reported by WSJ.

Facebook Will Collaborate With Fact-Finding Companies

It began with a collaborative program between Facebook and third-party fact-finding companies that follow the Poynter's International Fact Checking Code of Principles. This includes companies like ABC News, Full Fact and other organizations across the globe. The organizations will proof-check the content for reliability and based on their reports. Facebook will flag unreliable information as 'disputed.' Also, Facebook gives a link article that explains why the story is disputed. The hoaxed story will appear on the lower part of the News Feed.

Facebook check if "disputed" articles are less likely to be shared

This makes the article less likely to be shared than others. Mosseri's post added that the company has found that if reading the explanation article makes people less likely to share it. This will be a sign to check if the story is actually misleading people in any way. His post also said that Facebook is testing to incorporate the signal into ranking especially for outliner articles, as reported by USA today.

The hoaxes are being spread online with the intent to increase traffic in websites. To reduce these instances, Facebook removed the features that allow domain spoofing. Facebook is also analyzing publisher sites that require a strong policy enforcement. The social media maggot is also looking out for a news partnerships division head to work hand-in-hand with news outputs to make sure that only quality content is shared on the platform.

See Now: NASA's Juno Spacecraft's Rendezvous With Jupiter's Mammoth Cyclone

More on SCIENCEwr