Germany has been eyed as a "fake news hotspot" while the country's key election came up with parliamentary polls scheduled for September. Facebook announced on Sunday that it will initiate a series of measures to avoid the dissemination of fake news on German-language platforms.
"We are working very carefully on a solution to this problem. Our efforts are focused on the distribution of unique false alarms generated by spammers," says Facebook in a statement. "We have also used third parties to provide objective, unbiased reviews of news."
Correctiv, a German nonpartisan nonprofit collective dedicated to investigative journalism was brought in by Facebook to take care of fact checking and review the user-flagged stories found on the platforms.
According to Correctiv, fake news found on Facebook is clearly a major threat of society. The collective is concerned that the threats will only grow as elections start to roll in.
Facebook will create tools to easily report suspected fake news articles. A display warning will come up next to statements that has been deemed false by Correctiv.
Whenever the fact checker suspects the news as unreliable, the story will find itself de-prioritized in Facebook's news feed algorithm. This would essentially mean that there would be a lot of people who will see the story hitting their newsfeed.
German officials threatened internet companies with prosecution under strict libel and slander laws if they did not focus their efforts on eradicating fake news on their platforms. Germany's Justice Minister Heiko Mass said that we need to fully utilize all the legal authority at our disposal.
While Facebook is actively looking at Germany, the company is sizing up other countries as well. Right now, Facebook is testing the fake news filter in the United States. US President Barack Obama who recently delivered his farewell speech in a 360 video called false news found on the popular social media platform a "dust cloud of nonsense" and "crazy conspiracy theorizing."
