Facebook has been on the getting finish from governments of numerous nations for its inability to handle misinformation. In February the Indian government also introduced recommendations to regulate content shared on social media and streaming platforms producing WhatsApp, a corporation that Facebook owns, sue the government. According to the corporation spokesperson, the new guidelines will break their ‘end-to-end encryption’ policy undermining the user’s appropriate to privacy.
Facebook that owns WhatsApp, Instagram now has announced a slew of new measures to tackle the menace of misinformation. In an official press release, the Mark Zuckerberg-led corporation stated it will take stronger action against customers and pages repeatedly sharing misinformation, be it misleading content against Covid-19 vaccines, elections, or climate adjust.
Clampdown on Pages that repeatedly share misinformation
Facebook stated that it will decrease the attain of serial offenders of fake news. The distribution of all posts in News Feed from these Facebook accounts, be it of an person or a web page will be lowered if they share content that has been rated by one of its reality-checking partners.
Warning customers about following pages that share false claims
Users will now get a pop-up if they go to a web page whose content has been repeatedly rated by Fact Checkers to warn them just before liking or following them. Users can also find out more about the contents the reality-checkers have earlier flagged and hyperlink to more information about the reality-checking plan. This measure will assist customers make an informed choice in following a web page of growing the attain of content posted by such a web page.
Revamped notification feature when shared content is reality-checked
This redesigned feature will alert a user that one of the posts that they have shared had false details rated by a reality-checker along with the hyperlink of the post de-bunking the report or claim and a prompt to share the new post with followers. The customers will also get a warning that sharing false details will make their posts slide decrease in the News Feed so that their good friends are much less most likely to discover them.
Now it remains to be seen what positive outcomes these expanded new recommendations will bring.