Facebook Now To Rate Reliability of Users To Stop Fake News
It can be said with full confidence that Facebook is already in a lot of trouble. The company is battling with privacy issues, lack of features, overloading of advertisements and also the spread of false news. The company has made moves to tackle these issues, but they have all backfired on the company. The company’s latest move to tackle the spread of false news within the social network is to assign a score of reliability to its users. But, how does this actually work?
The social network would now soon assign each user a confidence score, and that in turn determines the users’ reliability including reports based on certain articles. After Facebook ranks the media according to their reliability, users who go through the survey would go under the scanner to be rated by the company.
This ensures that no one is left from being rated either by users or the company. But one might think, what is the need for these many checking’s? Well, the company has expressed its concern that it is not uncommon for people to tell the company that something is wrong simply because that particular user does not agree with their opinion, or because they intentionally try to target a particular publisher.
Reliability Scores
The reliability scores range from 0 and 10, but they are not supposed to be seen as the indicators for the credibility of a person. This score, instead, would be seen as a new measure among the various tools used by Facebook. Though the score and grading system has been announced, it is not yet clear as to what is the criteria which would be used to determine the score that has been provided.
But what we know right now is how the reliability score increases to a degree. If a person reports on a ton of fake news, and if it indeed turns out to be fake news, then the reliability score of that particular person increases. But on the other hand, if a person reports a lot of news as fake, and if they turn out to be true, then his reliability score decreases.
Against Fake News
Though it might seem a bit unfair on Facebook’s side to not tell us how the grading system works, it actually makes sense for them not to tell because then the algorithms they use would then be used against them. And if this algorithm is then leaked, it would be of benefit of those publishing fake news, thus working against Facebook in itself.
For now, we can only hope that this plan of Facebook works and that we have a fake-news free experience with Facebook.
