Meta partners with PTI to expand its fact checking program in India

Meta's fact-checking programme in India includes partnerships with independent fact-checking organisations to prevent the spread of misinformation on its platforms

Social media giant Meta announced on Monday its collaboration with the Press Trust of India (PTI) under its third-party fact-checking programme in India.

The partnership will enable PTI to identify, review, and rate content as misinformation across Meta platforms.

Meta's fact-checking programme in India includes partnerships with independent fact-checking organisations that assist users in identifying, reviewing, verifying information, and helping to prevent the spread of misinformation on its platforms.

“With this partnership with PTI, we now have 12 fact-checking partners in India, making it the country with the most third-party fact-checking partners globally across Meta,” said the company.

Under the initiative, Meta partners with fact-checkers certified through the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), who identify, review, and rate viral misinformation across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

When a fact-checker rates content as false, altered, or partly false, the company reduces its distribution so fewer people see it.

“We notify people who try to share the content—or who previously shared it—that the information was rated by a fact-checker, and we add a warning label that links to the fact-checker’s article with more information about the claim,” said the company in a press release.

The social media giant has nearly 100 partners around the world to review and rate viral misinformation in more than 60 languages.

In India, the fact-checking partners under the programme can verify information in 16 languages, including Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Urdu, Punjabi, Assamese, Manipuri/Meitei, Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil, Kashmiri, Bhojpuri, Oriya, and Nepali, as well as English.

“The focus of the programme is to address viral misinformation, particularly clear hoaxes that have no basis in fact. Fact-checking partners prioritise provably false claims that are timely, trending, and consequential,” said the company.

Meta’s partnership with PTI is part of a series of steps the social media giant has taken to combat misinformation in the past few months, ahead of the Indian general elections.

Last month, the company collaborated with the Misinformation Combat Alliance (MCA) to launch a dedicated fact-checking helpline on WhatsApp aimed at combating deepfakes and deceptive AI-generated content.

The helpline, now live on the Meta-owned messaging platform, allows users to flag deepfakes by alerting a dedicated chatbot.