Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook have been dealing with a lot of criticism for... well, a lot of things. In America, it's not only over Facebook taking private information from users but also the fact that their platform played a major role in Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential elections. Fake news advertisements have been popping up across the world. If you're Canadian, you probably saw a few ahead of the federal elections.
Facebook has now announced the False Information app which aims to combat fake news in hopes of preventing any foreign interference in the 2020 elections. The rollout for the new feature arrives just two weeks after the U.S. Senate Committee referred to Facebook as "the most effective tool" in investigating the interference.
The new feature seems pretty legit. An independent team of fact-checkers will determine whether news pieces shared on the social media platform is fake news or not. From there, the piece of news that pops on your feed will be fact-checked to let you know whether it's false.
"In addition to clearer labels, we’re also working to take faster action to prevent misinformation from going viral, especially given that quality reporting and fact-checking takes time. In many countries, including in the US, if we have signals that a piece of content is false, we temporarily reduce its distribution pending review by a third-party fact-checker," it reads on their website.