Fake news has been a growing problem across social media for a while now; misleading millions of people and instigating unwarranted witch-hunts against people in the public eye for the sake of traffic.
For Facebook, this terrible trend could be coming to an end. The company has just released their new fake news filter in Germany, which has been created to detect unverified news on people’s walls and flag them as fake.
Facebook was aware of how their platform was being used to generate revenue through this form of misinformation and worked with several different news outlets to help tackle fake news.
Their efforts led to the successful launch of the fake news filter in the US last month, but now considerable efforts are being made to make this filter available throughout the world. Facebook’s fact-checking system is able to send stories that are reported fake directly to a non-profit news organization in Berlin called Correctiv, who promptly research the story and deem it true or false.
Fake news can cause political interference, which can be seen from the recent scandal surrounding several fabricated articles and stories published around the time of the US Presidential Election.
