Hey Facebook, how’s that “crack team of fact checkers” doing?
Apparently, not great.
Back in December, when Zuck announced his plan to deploy a team of third-party fact-checkers to flag and remove “fake news,” we as Americans, were skeptical.
Frankly, the idea that a ragtag group of vigilante journalists from news outlets like ABC, Politico, and Snopes could physically pour through millions of reported posts seemed a little outlandish.
And, it looks we were right to be dubious
Yesterday, Politico reported that the fact-checkers recruited by Facebook to stop the spread of fake news are growing restless.
According to the checkers, the social network refuses to share any data with them as to whether the “disputed” tags they’re putting on fake articles are actually slowing the spread of false information -- or if they’re having any impact at all.
They also have no way of knowing which stories are most important to fact-check at any given moment.
Which is an issue, because there are thousands to go through
And given their current “time intensive” process, they will probably only get to about 2 of the 1.5k stories reported on a given day.
Aaron Sharockman, executive director of Politifact, says that a single fact-check can take up to 5 hours. While Facebook ranks questionable stories by popularity, checkers don’t have much insight into how fast a post is spreading, or even whether it’s already been reviewed by another third-party checker.
Needless to say, the process could use some refining
Critics pointed to Facebook’s fake news as a key factor in the spread of misinformation in the 2016 US presidential campaign -- and just yesterday, FB told federal investigators that they inadvertently sold $100k of ads to a Russian “troll farm” targeting American voters with “divisive social and political messages.”
The campaign included about 3k ads and 470 inauthentic Pages. At the rate of their current fact-checking system, it would take third-parties about 2,350 hours to root them out. I guess we'll find out.
