Facebook Journalism Project Announced to Tackle Fake News

The rise of social media in the digital age has altered the way we source our information. However, filtering the right information from the wrong one is not always easy.

Facebook has announced a new program to establish stronger ties between the social media platform and the news industry to tackle fake news. It will be collaborating with news organizations to develop products, learning from journalists about ways they can be a better partner, and working with publishers and educators on how it can equip people with the knowledge they need to be informed readers in the digital age.

Facebook is in the process of testing and introducing new content formats for publishers, is deploying training and tools for journalists, and taking measures to curb fake news.

Collaborative development of news products

As part of the Facebook Journalism Project, the company will collaborate with news organizations across the spectrum, connecting their product and engineering teams so that they can build together from the early stages of the product development process.

New storytelling formats

As people’s preferences for consuming news evolve, it’s critical to work together on figuring out which new storytelling formats will help people be more informed. Facebook is ready to work with partners to evolve their current formats — Live, 360, Instant Articles, etc. — to better suit their needs, and work with them on building entirely new ones.

Local news

Local news is the starting place for great journalism — it brings communities together around issues that are closest to home. Facebook will collaborate with their partners to support local news and promote independent media. This initiative is in its earliest stages.

Hackathons

One of our longest standing traditions at Facebook is hackathons where their engineers take a break from their day-to-day work to explore new problems and technical solutions. The company will be launching a program globally where Facebook engineers will host sessions with developers from news organizations to collaborate to identify opportunities and hack solutions.

Training & Tools for Journalists

Facebook is already offering newsroom training and now they are going to conduct a series of e-learning courses on Facebook products, tools, and services for journalists. This training will be expanded to nine additional languages, including a partnership with Poynter to launch a certificate curriculum for journalists in the months ahead.

Facebook is going to collaborate with Knight Foundation, Detroit Journalism Cooperative, Institute for NonProfit News, Local Independent News Online (LION), Institute for Journalism in New Media, Montclair State University’s Center for Cooperative Media and more for providing training at scale for local newsrooms.

Tools

Facebook recently acquired CrowdTangle, a tool to surface stories, measure their social performance and identify influencers. This service will become free for their partners.

Journalists are using Facebook Live to find and share news and connect with their audiences. The company is now building more tools to help journalists use Live to report and discover news as easily as possible. Today, it has launched the ability for Page administrators to designate specific journalists as contributors, giving them the ability to go live on behalf of the Page, a change designed to make such reporting more flexible for newsrooms.

Helping with eyewitness media

Eyewitnesses who upload videos and images during breaking news events have become powerful and important sources for journalists. Facebook is now a member of the First Draft Partner Network, a coalition of platforms and 80+ publishers, that works together to provide practical and ethical guidance in how to find, verify and publish content sourced from the social web.

Promoting news literacy

Facebook is ready to work with third-party organizations on how to better understand and to promote news literacy both on and off their platform to help people in their community have the information they need to make decisions about which sources to trust. Facebook is working with the News Literacy Project to produce a series of public service ads (PSAs) to help inform people on Facebook about this important issue.

Continuing efforts to curb news hoaxes

To further reduce the spread of news hoaxes — including ways for people to report them more easily and new efforts to disrupt the financial incentives for spammers Facebook has introduced a program to work with third-party fact-checking organizations that are signatories of Poynter’s International Fact Checking Code of Principles to identify hoaxes on Facebook. This problem is much bigger than any one platform, and it’s important for all of us to work together to minimize its reach.