Facebook expects concrete examples of false news that has been captured (or lost) that could improve information literacy or at least show that it is attacking the misinformation problem. Today Facebook launched "The Hunt For False News", in which it examines the EE virus. UU., Transmit the decisions of third-party fact verifiers and explain how the story was tracked. The first edition reveals cases in which false legends were placed on old videos, people were mistakenly identified as perpetrators of crimes or the real facts were greatly exaggerated.
The blog's launch comes after three recent studies showed that the volume of misinformation on Facebook has decreased. in half since the 2016 elections, while the volume of Twitter has not declined so drastically. Unfortunately, the remaining 50 percent continues to threaten elections, civil discourse, the safety of dissidents and political unity throughout the world.
In one of the first examples of The Hunt, this discredits a man who posed for a photo with one of the Brazilian senators had stabbed the presidential candidate. Facebook explains that their automatic learning models identified the photo; Brazilian fact tester Aos Fatos showed that it was false, and now Facebook automatically detects and downloads image uploads. In a case where it did not reach the mark, a false story that promotes NASA would pay $ 100,000 to study it. Staying in bed for 60 days "accumulated millions of visits on Facebook" before testers discovered that NASA had paid $ 10,000 to $ 17,000 in limited cases for past studies.
While the "Hunting" educational series is useful, it simply selects random stories from fake news for a long period of time. What is more urgent, and would be more useful, would be that Facebook applies this method to the misinformation currently circulating about the most important news. Kevin Roose of the New York Times recently started using Facebook's CrowdTangle tool to highlight the top 10 recent stories on topics like Brett Kavanaugh's audiences.
If Facebook wants to be more transparent about its successes and failures around false news, publishes lists of false stories with more circulation each month. and then apply the Hunt format plus explaining how they were denied. This could help dispel myths in the understanding of society that can be spread by the sheer abundance of fake news headlines, even if users do not click on the read ones.
The red line represents the decline of Facebook's commitment to "unreliable or dubious sites"
But at least all of Facebook's efforts around information security, including the duplication of its security personnel 10,000 to 20,000 workers, fact checks and the use of changes in the News Feed algorithm to degrade suspicious content are paying off.
- A Stanford and The New York University study found that Facebook likes, comments, it shares and reacts to links to 570 fake news sites that were more than halved since the 2016 elections, while commitments via Twitter continued to rise, "with Facebook's share of commitments regarding shares of Twitter decreasing by approximately 60 percent. "
- A study by the University of Michigan coined the" Iffy Quotient "metric to assess the amount of content from certain fake news sites. Buted on Facebook and Twitter. When commitment was taken into account, he discovered that Facebook levels had dropped to the volume of early 2016, which is now 50 percent less than Twitter.
- The French newspaper Le Monde analyzed the commitment with 630 French websites on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Reddit. Facebook's commitment to so-called "unreliable or doubtful" sites has been cut in half since 2015.
Of course, given the apparent paralysis of Twitter when addressing erroneous information and trolling, they are not a good benchmark to judge Facebook. While it is useful that Facebook is delineating ways to detect false news, the public will have to internalize these strategies for society to progress. That can be difficult when the truth has become incompatible with the held beliefs of many peoples and politicians.
In the past, Facebook has appeared fake news to detect news at the top of the news source and has bought full-page newspaper ads trying to spread them. The Hunt For Fake News would surely benefit from being embedded where users of the social network see themselves every day instead of buried in their corporate blog.