Social Networking site Facebook in a move to curb the spread of fake news and spread of misinformation ahead of assembly elections in Rajasthan has started a process to deploy independent fact-checkers to deal with the reported. The main focus of the social networking giant is to stop the fabricated news from getting viral.
Facebook Public Policy Director for India and South Asia,Shivnath Thukral, who was in Jaipur to review the preparations, said the teams at the website were focusing on the defense against election interference, protection of the communities against abuse and ensuring more control on information, as India’s largest State was going to polls on December 7.
Informing about the preparation, Thukral said, “Facebook would work on the policy of “reduce, remove and inform”. Immediately after getting a report from any user on a news item, the Facebook team will check if it is against the community standards and reduce its virality to ensure that the fabricated information should not pass from one to all. Following which, the subsequent options will include either the complete removal, if a video is found offensive, or keeping the video posted with the ‘i’ option for getting information on its origin and date and time of upload.
In the recent past, there have been many videos went viral on the pretext of wrong information.
He further said that Facebook had expanded its fact-checking programme to include partners across 22 countries to tackle false news. “While Facebook uses machine self-operating learning tools to tackle the reported contents, the fact-checkers will consider the regional language context for understanding the reported post,” He added.
Facebook Policy Chief Thukral also informed Facebook users in the State would be reminded of polling day, which would appear on top of their news feed in order to make them aware about the most important duty of any democratic nation.
The Polling in the state will take place on December 7, and the results will be announced on December 11.