Facebook launches initiative against fake news in France
Facebook is partnering with a number of major news organizations in France to prevent fake news from being published on the social media platform. The initiative will be launched in the run-up to the upcoming French presidential elections in April and May.
According to the French newspaper Le Monde, Facebook will collaborate with eight media, including Le Monde, AFP and Libération. The system used allows Facebook users to report if a post contains incorrect information. The report goes to a portal that the eight media have access to. If at least two of the participating media companies confirm that it is fake news, the message will be flagged as such in Facebook and users will be warned if they want to share the message. The project will begin on Monday, Reuters reports.
The initiative in France is in line with previous initiatives launched in the United States and Germany. At the end of last year, Facebook started reducing fake news in America, after the platform received a lot of criticism about how much ‘fake news’ that circulated on Facebook has influenced the outcome of the US presidential election.
Facebook will also support the CrossCheck system. This initiative by First Draft News, co-supported by Google News Lab, is a project in which 17 French news media outlets work together to combat the spread of fake news. It also works through the readership, who can report when fake news is being spread and take action. In addition, French news media have also organized their own initiatives against fake news, such as Le Monde, which has created a database of more than 600 websites that should be labeled as untrustworthy.
A journalist from Le Monde, Jérôme Fenoglio, says the newspaper was initially hesitant to participate in Facebook’s project, because it would entail too much workload for the newspaper’s fact-checkers. But in the end, the newspaper decided to participate, because it thinks Facebook’s algorithms help limit the spread of fake news. The algorithm can also be adjusted based on new journalistic insights regarding possible fake news, which Fenoglio finds an interesting possibility.