As one of the biggest social media platforms, Facebook has a responsibility to make their users aware of misinformation being shared in their website. This was a concern during the last elections in the Philippines and even in the US, and was brought up again at the height of the pandemic with conspiracy theories regarding the origins of the virus and microchips in vaccines.
For their part, Facebook has already assigned fact-checkers across the globe that will verify news sources as legit or not. But that doesn’t exactly address the spread of misinformation that trolls usually do, so they stepped it up.
Pages that have repeatedly posted misinformation, as rated by fact-checkers, will now have a pop-up in case you’re about to click Like. Facebook hopes that this will help curb the following of such pages.
But as for the real problem, Zucc and friends are now also penalizing individual accounts. They will lessen that account’s mileage in News Feeds if they have repeatedly shared posts with misinformation as verified by the checkers.
They’ve also not built a notification in case you’ve previously shared an un-rated post, that was later debunked by a fact-checker. It will have a link to the article that debunks the claim of the shared post, as well as the option to share it with your friends. There will also be a notice that repeated sharing of such posts will mean your future posts will rank low in the News Feed.
Will this be enough to curb the troll farms going on? Only time can tell especially now that politicians are gearing up for the 2022 elections. Facebook, as well as other social media sites, will be put to the test again and see how they fare against modern warfare.
