Facebook is on the move to continue its attempts to fight potential hoax articles on its platform. To do this, it's sending more articles to third-party fact checkers, said the world's largest online social network.
Its its statement, the company said that it's starting to use an updated version of machine learning to detect any possible hoaxes, to then send them to fact checkers, potentially showing fact-checking results under the original article.
On July 3rd, 2017, Facebook said in a separate statement in German that a test of the fact-checking feature was being launched in the United States, France, the Netherlands and Germany.
"In addition to seeing which stories are disputed by third-party fact checkers, people want more context to make informed decisions about what they read and share," said Sara Su, Facebook News Feed product manager, in a blog.
She added that Facebook would keep testing its "related article" feature and work on other changes to its News Feed to cut down the number of hoaxes and fake news.
Facebook has been criticized as being one of the main place for fake news and hoaxes to spread and become viral. Many were influenced that misleading information has even affected the results of the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
As one of the giants of the web, this is an inevitable result of people having high engagement on its News Feed. As Facebook becomes massively popular for distribution channels for news, politically-polarized climate where campaign objectives and ad revenue seeking by giving misleading information is a certain byproduct.
The issue has also become a big political topic in Europe, with French voters deluged with false stories ahead of the presidential election in May. Germany has also been planning to fine social media networks if they fail to remove hateful postings promptly.
While AI and other attempts may not be sufficient to filter out everything Facebook has considering its massive size, but it's another step in the right direction.