Shocked by accusations that it allowed fake stories on its platform during the 2016 elections, social media giant, Facebook has began its conquest to create a feature to filter out fake news and regain the trust of its users. The tool will efficiently offer different perspectives for the same news, which will enable the users to determine the truth.
The Related Articles feature was tested by Facebook this spring, which presents the users of a wide number of articles on the same topic, including the articles written by legal organizations.
Facebook has also found a way to mark possible hoax articles by upgrading its machine learning technology, and deliver those stories to fact-checkers from outside the organization, as reported by News Feed product officer Sara Su. After the review, stories from other sources will be posted as related articles under the original one.
Mark Zuckerberg has taken a lot of criticism ever since the election cycle in 2016, as Facebook did not filter fake news on its platform. The Facebook CEO has understood the critical comments and the role of his company to provide factual news and information to its users.
Facebook also brought in CNN and NBC broadcaster Campbell Brown in order to assist the company in improving its relationship with big media organizations, and to fulfill the journalistic standards after improving the accuracy of the content provided to users in their News Feeds.
Facebook has also had a bad relationship with media outlets, with many news sites finding their articles and videos posted on Facebook for free, with no way to get revenue or check how many people actually visited the content.
Following this, Facebook last month announced that it had prepared a paywall, that would charge readers a fee to read content from few websites, after a grace period of 10 free articles per month have been completed.
Other underground services in countries like China, Russia and those in the Middle East have increased fake news, often manipulating news from different sources.
Analysts, though, have admired Facebook’s approach, as it doesn’t point fingers directly on particular stories, but provides readers with same news from different sources to evaluate the news themselves.
Moreover, it is not just Facebook, that has the problem of fake news. Tech giant Google has also received a lot of criticism for allowing fake content and other services to increase the reach of some content up their search rankings, without checking their accuracy. This misleads the users when they search for a particular news and find legitimate stories next to the fake ones.
Google has also upgraded its algorithms, and has now prepared to use a search-quality rater, and feedback tools, to filter out fake news from its search engine.
Moreover, Google has also extended the use of Jigsaw’s fact-checker in its global search, with Google News linking to websites which share legal content on their websites.
Google also found in a study that the fake news and biased search methods did not effect public opinion to a greater context, in a survey with 14,000 different internet users
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