SUMMARY
The partnership will enable PTI to identify, review and rate content as misinformation across Meta platforms
The social media giant’s Indian language coverage stands at 16 through its existing fact-checking partners
The focus of the program is to address viral misinformation– particularly clear hoaxes that have no basis
Facebook parent Meta has joined hands with the news agency Press Trust of India (PTI) as it looks to expand its third-party fact checking programme in India ahead of the forthcoming Lok Sabha polls.
With this collaboration, Meta now has 12 fact-checking partners in India, making it the country with the most third-party fact-checking partners globally across the platform.
The partnership will enable PTI to identify, review and rate content as misinformation across Meta platforms.
To fight the spread of misinformation and provide people with more reliable information, Meta partners with independent third-party fact-checkers that are certified through the non-partisan International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) who identify, review and rate viral misinformation across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
“Globally, we’ve also built the largest independent fact-checking network of any platform, with nearly 100 partners around the world to review and rate viral misinformation in more than 60 languages,” said Meta in its official announcement.
Meta’s Indian language coverage stands at 16 through its existing fact-checking partners to include Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Urdu, Punjabi, Assamese, Manipuri/ Meitei, Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil, Kashmiri, Bhojpuri, Oriya and Nepali, besides English.
The focus of the program is to address viral misinformation– particularly clear hoaxes that have no basis. Fact-checking partners prioritise provably false claims that are timely, trending and consequential.
Each time a fact-checker rates a piece of content as false, altered or partly false, Meta reduces its distribution so that fewer people see it.
“We notify people who try to share the content– or who previously shared it– that the information was rated by a fact-checker, and we add a warning label that links to the fact-checker’s article with more information about the claim,” said Meta.
Last month, Meta also joined forces with the Misinformation Combat Alliance (MCA) to introduce a specialised fact-checking helpline on WhatsApp, targeting the eradication of deepfakes and misleading AI-generated content. This helpline, presently operational on Meta’s proprietary messaging platform, enables users to report instances of deepfakes by notifying a designated chatbot.
