SINGAPORE, May 2 — Facebook expanded its fact-checking programme to Singapore today, more than two years after first launching it in the United States and United Kingdom in 2016.
Singapore will be the fifth Asia-Pacific country where the social media giant will be working with Agence France-Presse (AFP) — an international news organisation — to “reduce the spread of misinformation and improve the quality of the news people find online”, said Facebook in a media release.
The other Asia-Pacific countries where the fact-checking initiative has been launched are the Philippines, Indonesia, India and Australia.
AFP will be reviewing and rating the accuracy of stories, photos and videos on Facebook that are being consumed in Singapore. It will monitor stories that are produced in English, Mandarin and Malay.AFP’s Asia fact-check editor Catherine Barton told TODAY that it will have one dedicated fact-checking reporter at its Singapore bureau, and a regional editorial fact-checking team in Hong Kong. Its global fact-checking network will lend further support.
On what content it will investigate, Barton said: “We select content to investigate based on criteria including editorial interest, how widely something has been shared and whether it has entered public debate. We employ both digital verification techniques and traditional reporting methods in our evaluation and publish our findings on content we deem to be deliberately misleading”
Tech companies have come under greater pressure to curb the spread of fake news in recent years, as governments around the world grapple with the threat of fake news.
Facebook uses nine options to rate the content that has been assessed. The options include “false” (where the primary claims made are factually inaccurate), “mixture” (where the primary claim is misleading or incomplete), “false headline”, “opinion”, “true” and “not eligible” (a claim that is not verifiable, or a website or page that is primarily expressing an opinion or the agenda of a political figure).
This is how the programme works:
1. Facebook will identify potentially false news based on user feedback and through its own algorithm, and feed them to AFP. The fact-checker will also proactively identify false news content.
2. AFP will review and rate the accuracy of the articles.
3. If a story has been rated “false”, “mixture” or “false headline”, it will have its distribution reduced — appearing lower in the news feed and accompanied by related articles from fact-checkers.
In a media conference today, Facebook’s Asia-Pacific director of news partnerships, Anjali Kapoor, said that the platform does not remove all false content as “we are not the arbiters of truth and our community does not want us to be”.
Facebook has previously said that it will remove false content only if it leads to voter suppression, or poses a threat of imminent violence.
Kapoor said its fact-checking programme plays a role in reducing the spread of misinformation. People who try to share content rated “false”, “mixture” or “false headline” will be notified of the additional reporting by fact-checkers. They will also be notified if content they have shared in the past has since been rated by a fact-checker.
Articles that have been fact-checked will have a label attached.
Kapoor said that Facebook will take action against pages that repeatedly publish false content. For example, publishers will see their distribution reduced and not be allowed to monetise their content.
On the outcomes of its fact-checking programme in other Asia-Pacific countries, Kapoor said the distribution of content that has been fact-checked and found to contain falsehoods was reduced by 80 per cent.
While some Facebook employees based overseas are involved in fact-checking, none in Singapore will be involved, said Kapoor.
Facebook has quadrupled the number of its third-party fact-checking partners over the past year to 52 across 33 countries.
However, some media outlets and fact-checking organisations such as Associated Press and Snopes have reportedly cut ties with the company due to doubts over the programme’s impact and effectiveness. — TODAY
