Social networking site Facebook has a new plan to deal with false news: Taking the financial incentives for those who create fake content out of the platform.
Campbell Brown, Head of Facebook's Global News Partnerships, in an interview to Indianexpress.com, said that most of the false news is "financially motivated. So what we have done is disrupt the financial incentives," adding that her team had succeeded by "cutting off their capability to make money.”
Facebook, over the past couple of years, particularly after the 2016 US Presidential elections and the Cambridge Analytica controversy, has been in the eye of a storm.
Brown warned that expecting the problem to go in its entirety would be wrong. She added that Facebook has now become more efficient at “identifying fake accounts and removing them.”
Third-Party Fact-Checking
The largest social media platform in the world also looks forward to forging new partnerships to curb the menace of false news on users' timeline. In line with this objective is Facebook's partnership with third party fact-checkers like Boom Live in India, Brown told Indianexpress.com.
These third-party fact-checkers will check the authenticity of any piece of information that gets red-flagged by users, and the ranking of that content will also largely depend on its authenticity. “We are optimistic that we have the right tools for what’s coming.”
Cleaner Timelines
The Facebook has incorporated new changes as a result of which the focus is more on increasing social interaction between friends and family members. “Instead of engagement, which was kind of how we thought about it previously, we now focus on what we characterise as meaningful social interaction,” she says.
Excessive content from not just news platforms but several other sources overshadowed posts from friends and families. In a bid to bring this back, there has been an “overall reduction in public content on the platform”, Brown said.
However, the platform is still careful about not striking out the news. Brown says that the objective is to bring in quality and not quantity.
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