Social network is testing new features to help 'kill' fake news

abiola

October 6, 2017 11:16 AM

The company is taking a proactive step having come under fire for being negligent towards responsibility to moderate misinformation on its platform.

Facebook is taking a very brilliant step towards stopping the spread of fake news on its platform via collaboration with Wikipedia.

The company which has come under intense attack by the US government and citizens is testing the insertion into its newsfeed an ‘I’ button which when users click on would see a Wikipedia description of the publisher.

The idea behind this is that Wikipedia is a trusted site which is mostly run by human editors as against computer-based algorithms. It is therefore highly unlikely that publishers would put up malicious words like ‘’Jew hater’’ on their Wikipedia page and get away with it because Wikipedia is quite efficient in monitoring for and preventing such abuse.

In addition to the Wikipedia link button, a button to check out related articles will be included to give it all more context.

“We’ll continue to listen to people’s feedback and work with publishers to provide people easy access to the contextual information that helps people decide which stories to read, share, and trust, and to improve the experiences people have on Facebook.” wrote an author on Facebook’s newsroom site.

So with these planned features, readers should be able to make informed decisions as to trusting the credibility of that news article.

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