Facebook Gets Someone Else To Flag Fake News

Facebook has been getting a lot of flak since the victory of Donald Trump due to the perceived notion that the proliferation of fake news on the social media site helped him secure the presidency. Now, Facebook is enlisting the help of third-party companies to flag fake news to prevent them from reaching high rankings.

FactCheck.org, a fact-checking non-profit organization will be helping Facebook weed out what’s real news and what’s fake news without compromising the social media site’s policy of not being “the arbiter of truth,” TechCrunch reports. It will be joined by a few other groups, including Politifact and the Associated Press.

Facebook’s Founder, Mark Zuckerberg had already promised to do something about fake news while still maintaining the delicate balance of free speech within such a diverse social community. By asking for help from other organizations that are not directly connected to the social media site and have built reputations for being impartial when it comes to the truth, Facebook is able to claim that suppressing fake news is not solely its decision.

On that note, it would seem that the social network still wants to avoid as much liability as it possibly can. In fact, Adam Mosseri, the vice-president of Facebook’s News Feed told TechCrunch that the news content that will be suppressed will be very specific.

“We’re not looking to get into the grey area of opinion,” Mosseri said. “What we are focusing on with this work is specifically the worst of the work — clear hoaxes that were shared intentionally, usually by spammers, for financial gain.”

Zuckerberg himself tried to reassure the public that the involvement of fact-checkers will not change Facebook’s neutrality on politics, Forbes reports. The social network’s founder also said that they will continue to look for help from other organizations that are unbiased fact-checkers.