LAST UPDATED: June 30, 2020, 12:00 a.m. EST: Facebook is being criticized badly for not doing enough to stop fake news on its platform. This month Facebook shares also dropped by 8.2% after a campaign criticizing Facebook for misinformation and fake news went viral. On Monday, Facebook announced to get into a partnership with fact-checking charity company “Full Fact” to stop the fake news on Social media. From next month, Facebook will run an ad campaign with independent fact-checking charity Full Fact to aware users.
Facebook users across the united states, united kingdom, Europe, and the middle east will see the ad as awareness measures against fake news. This will encourage them to think logically before sharing and believing any news they see online. In the ad campaign, Facebook will be asking users to check the origin of information, what’s missing in the news, and how it makes them feel.
With the growing protection of users’ privacy on Facebook and other social media apps. It’s hard to keep a record of who sharing what? The spread of fake news is beyond facebook and largely being shared by people in private WhatsApp groups, Twitter timeline, etc. The only way to stop fake news is to make people aware of the potential misinformation in news and its disadvantages to society.
Apart from Full fact, Facebook also rolled out the Article warning features that tell users about a news article if it is older than 90 Days. Not just Facebook, twitter also brought the brand new feature of “Reading before sharing”. This will force users to actually read the article before they share it blindly on their timelines.
Fighting misinformation is an evolving problem and facebook is fighting it since 2016 with the launch of the Fact-checking program. Since 2016, Facebook has partnered with over 50 organizations with expertise in over 40 languages to stop the misinformation and fake news on its platform.
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