Facebook exploring new ways to fight fake news fast

With elections happening around the world month after month, Facebook is kicking off a new collaborative process with outside experts to reduce the distribution of greater quantities of misinformation in a short span of time.

"One promising idea we've been exploring would involve relying on groups of people who use Facebook to point to journalistic sources that can corroborate or contradict the claims made in potentially false content, as discussed in this video," Henry Silverman, Facebook's Operations Specialist wrote in a blog post this week.

Facebook already has several measures in place to fight misinformation on its platform. But despite these efforts -- which include using both technology and people to fight the rise in photo and video-based misinformation and deployment of third-party fact-checking programme -- tackling false information continue to be a huge challenge for the social networking giant.

"With more than a billion things posted to Facebook each day, we need to find additional ways to expand our capacity," Silverman said.

"We're going to share with experts the details of the methodology we've been thinking about, to help these experts get a sense of where the challenges and opportunities are, and how they'll help us arrive at a new approach," Silverman added.

--IANS

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