By Alex Heath
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.
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
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.”
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.”
Conservatives react with skepticism and alarm to Facebook’s war on ‘fake news’
Conservatives reacted with alarm to Facebook’s announcement that it will partner
with fact-checkers to combat so-called fake news, expressing
extreme skepticism the fact-checking would be applied equally to
both sides of the political spectrum.
The social media giant said Thursday it would draw on an
international fact-checking network led by Poynter, a nonprofit
school for journalism, to label and bury fake news in the News
Feed. Outlets in the network include Snopes, ABC News, and
The Associated Press.
But the announcement was immediately met with fire from the
right.
“Fact-checkers all seem to be from the left,” Evan Siegfried, a
Republican strategist, wrote on Twitter. “Not good for
conservatives.”
Other conservatives quickly agreed, hammering Facebook for the
move.
“This is a disaster for news coverage,” wrote Ben Shapiro, a prominent conservative
and editor-in-chief of The Daily Wire. “It’s an attempt to
restore gatekeepers who have a bias as the ultimate arbiters of
truth.”
RBPundit, an influential anonymous conservative blogger,
published a series of tweets expressing strong concern.
“It’s going to be leftists reporting stories they don’t like and
leftists ‘fact-checking’ these stories,” RBPundit wrote. “It’s a fraud.”
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