Rajasthan Assembly Elections 2018: Facebook deploys independent fact-checkers to curb fake news

Immediately after getting a report on a news item, Facebook will check if it is against the community standards and reduce its virality.

Picture for representation purpose only.

Facebook has started a process to deploy independent fact-checkers to deal with the reported contents in an attempt to curb the spread of fake news and misinformation ahead of the Assembly elections in Rajasthan. The emphasis of the exercise will be on stopping the impugned news items from becoming viral.

Shivnath Thukral, Facebook public policy director for India and South Asia, who was in Jaipur to review the preparations, said the teams at the platform were focusing on the defence against election interference, protection of the community against abuse and ensuring more control on information, as India's largest State was going to polls.

“Through the improved artificial intelligence machines, thousands of pages, groups, and accounts involved in coordinated inauthentic behaviour have already been removed,” Mr. Thukral said. Facebook would work on the policy of “reduce, remove and inform”, he added.

Immediately after getting a report on a news item, Facebook will check if it is against the community standards and reduce its virality. 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.

Mr. Thukral said Facebook had expanded its fact-checking programme to include partners across 22 countries to tackle false news, while working to promote civic engagement ahead of election, and made significant engineering improvements to better detect inauthentic behaviour. “While Facebook uses machine learning tools to tackle the reported contents, the fact-checkers will consider the regional language context for understanding the reported post,” he said.

Facebook has also taken steps to share a cybersecurity guide with all stakeholders and set up cybersecurity cells for political parties and their candidates in order to safeguard their pages and profiles from being hacked. Mr. Thukral said Facebook users in the State would be reminded of polling day, which would appear on top of their news feed.