Nieman Journalism Lab: Full Fact has been fact-checking Facebook posts for six months. Here’s what they think needs to change [feedly]

a post by Laura Hazard Owen for NeimanLab [grateful thanks to Tara at ResearchBuzz for the heads up on this]

In December 2016, Facebook enlisted a handful of U.S.-based news organizations (ABC News, Snopes, PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, and the AP) to help stem the flow of false information on the platform. Over time, it’s expanded these third-party fact-checking partnerships: It now has more than 50 partners globally, fact-checking in 42 languages.

Full Fact, the independent UK fact-checking organization, signed on as one of Facebook’s third-party fact-checking partners in January. (All partners must be members of Poynter’s International Fact-Checking Network, though that hasn’t completely prevented disputes over who should qualify to be a fact-checker; some original partners like Snopes have dropped out.) Six months in, the organization has released a report about its experience so far — what it’s learned, what it likes, and what it thinks needs to change.

Full Fact’s two major concerns about the fact-checking program are scale and transparency — ongoing complaints among Facebook’s partners. “Facebook’s focus seems to be increasing scale by extending the Third Party Fact Checking Program to more languages and countries,” the report notes. “However, there is also a need to scale up the volume of content and speed of response” — being available in a lot of countries isn’t enough if individual country partners are only able to skim the surface of misleading content.

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You may have missed a post in this blog last month, “A Reminder That 'Fake News' Is An Information Literacy Problem - Not A Technology Problem”, which looked at the social issues of fake news.
You can use all the technological wizardry you want but if someone publishes something untrue but plausible someone else will share it and it grows exponentially.

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