Facebook Stumbles With Early Effort to Stamp Out Fake News

Facebook’s strategy to stamp out fake news is struggling, according to Bloomberg. The company outsources the process to third-party fact checkers who can only tackle a small fraction of the bogus news that floods the social network, according to interviews with people involved in the process.

A previous Facebook effort to hire people to curate articles was criticized as biased and the company’s artificial intelligence systems aren’t yet smart enough to determine what’s suspicious on their own. However, an inside look at Facebook’s fact-checking operation suggests that the small-scale, human approach is unlikely to control a problem that’s still growing and spreading globally.

When enough Facebook users say an article may be false, the story ends up on a dashboard accessible by the fact-checking staff at the five organizations. The fact-checking sites sometimes have to debunk the same story multiple times. There’s no room for nuance and its unclear how effectively they’re addressing the overall problem, workers for the fact-checking groups said in interviews. They only have time to tackle a small fraction of the articles in their Facebook lists.

“It might be even longer, honestly,“ said Aaron Sharockman, executive director of PolitiFact. “Everyone wishes for more transparency as to the impact of this tool.“ The group has marked about 2,000 links on Facebook as false so far, but he said he’s never personally seen a "disputed" tag from this work on the social network.

“There are whole hosts of copycats that spread a story,“ Sharockman said. “By the time we’ve done that process it’s probably living in 20 other places in some way, shape or form.“  Handling the Facebook dashboard is a good job for the interns, he added. Sharockman declined to discuss the mechanics of the dashboard, saying PolitiFact’s deal with the company limits what he can say.

Out of hundreds of potentially false stories a day, many of which are duplicates, the five fact-checking organizations only have time to address a fraction. An employee of one group said they aim to debunk five a day; another person targets 10 a week and estimated that the entire program may debunk 100 stories a month, including duplicates. Facebook confirmed it sends hundreds of dubious stories to fact checkers daily, but it wouldn’t comment how many are corrected.

Facebook expects this manual fact-checking work to help the company improve its algorithm over time, so it can get smarter at automatically spotting patterns and figuring out what stories might be worth showing to human partners, even before they’re flagged by users. Facebook also plans to extend its contracts beyond the first year, and it plans to provide further updates on progress before the end of the year, and start communicating more frequently with partners in 2018.