How Facebook Is Fighting Fake News Using More African Languages?

Is Facebook fighting fake news? Is Facebook doing enough to fight fake news? Everyone’s got a mixed view of that until this instrumental piece of information arrived.

In an era where just as alarming as the spread of fake information is its mass production using rampant social media platforms, someone somewhere has got to sit up and take corrective measures. For now, it seems that the famous American social media platform is getting it right!

That Facebook is fighting fake news and indeed, with some rich aplomb isn’t entirely incorrect. Where the current pieces of news are concerned, then something rather instrumental is right up to the social media platform’s alley.

Interesting as it may sound, Facebook has recently announced that more African languages will be covered in its bid to ward off the increasing threat of fake news. In what can only be described as a new, exciting and path-breaking partnership, Facebook and Africa Check- an independent fact-checking organization- have joined hands to keep a tab on the next big threat upon the world wide web other than unethical hacking: fake news!

Facebook plans to incorporate new language support, in a part of its ongoing efforts to check the validity of the information and that is why it has joined hands with a third-party fact-checking program, in an alliance with Africa Check.

In a joint statement issued earlier this week, Facebook shared that the number of languages now covered by the social media giant happens to be 10. So just what are these languages?

Some of these include- South Africa’s Swahili, Nigeria’s Yoruba, and Senegal’s Wolof.

But all that said how does the operation work so that Facebook can keep a tab on the spreading of Fake news? Here’s what one’s ought to know.

Those videos, posts, texts and other snippets of information that have already been flagged off as possibly containing fake news will be checked and monitored by Africa Check. This shall also include a lot of photo-related content.

But it’s important to understand that Facebook constantly relies on technology and feedback from its community-spread over in hundreds of thousands- to flag off potentially false stories in a bid to restrict, prevent them from spreading into its cosmos.

So how this works out is that those stories that have been labeled suspicious or alarming, identified as inaccurate- hence fake- shall be shown lower in the social media site’s newsfeed. This will, in turn, lower their distribution.

Mr. Noko Makgato, the executive director of Africa Check directed one’s attention to the crucial role that his organization is playing in joining hands with Mark Zuckerberg’s firm. He stated, “our job is to review this content, provide a rating and an informative article. The system allows us to rate content based on a range of options from ‘true’ to ‘mixture (of true and false),’ ‘satire,’ ‘opinion’ and ‘false.” 

Meanwhile here’s an official statement from Facebook regarding its ongoing efforts to curb fake news, “Our third-party fact-checking program is just one of many ways we are doing this, and with the expansion of local language coverage, this will help in further improving the quality of information people see on Facebook.”