Tuesday, August 21, 2018

Facebook begins rating users on how trustworthy they are at flagging fake news

Facebook has started rating its users’ trustworthiness in order to help the social network know how much to value user reports that a certain news story might be fake. The Washington Post has details on the system and confirmation from Facebook that it’s been put in place. The system certainly sounds a touch dystopian, but Facebook sees it as a valuable tool for weeding out disinformation.

The trust ratings went into place over the last year, according to the Post, and were developed as part of Facebook’s fight against fake and malicious stories. Facebook relies, in part, on reports from users to help catch these stories. If enough people report a story as false, someone on a fact-checking team will look into it. But checking every story...

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