What's a Deepfake, again?... Facebook, with its 2.5B users sharing billions of posts, just made a new addition to its fact-checking army: a whopping 4 journalists. The 4 Reuters journalists will join a US fact-checking team that includes the Associated Press, PolitiFact, Factcheck.org, and thousands of FB-employed contractors. Oh, and don't forget machine-taught AI bots that spot potentially false news and flag ALL-CAPS!!! posts.
- 'Tis the Season: Political ads season. Presidential primary elections are happening — and the outflow of political ads and posts is just gonna increase. FB's been in hot water for misinformation on its platform — and the jacuzzi is getting hotter.
- Cue the Fact Squad: We're calling it: Factual Accuracy Investigation League (or F.A.I.L., for short). This crew of moderators, journalists, and bots has a lot on its plate (billions of posts per day, including generous servings of misleading, false, and manipulative information).
- Blog About It: Reuters' 4 journalists will review user-generated vids, pics, and headlines that were flagged or submitted for review. Then, they'll blog about whether something is true, false, or partially true. FB will use those conclusions to label bad info and limit its spread in the News Feed algorithm (by up to 80%).
It would really take an army... to actually fact-check and verify every single Facebook post for misinformation, since most is user-generated content. Even with its F.A.I.L. army, Facebook has become nearly too big to moderate. And Zuck still insists that it's a social network — not an editorial operation like The Wall Street Journal. Since Facebook is failing to keep up, you'll need to stay vigilent.