In a bid to avoid a repeat of US presidential elections, Facebook used tools such as machine learning and training the governing authorities to deal with the problem of fake news and external meddling in elections.
Facebook. Reuters.
Facebook as per their blog post came up with tools to combat the aforementioned problem during the recent German elections. Facebook said that they had removed 10,000 fake accounts during the elections. These accounts were tracked owing to any suspicious activities.
Secondly, it used machine learning to test Related Articles. With the surge in clickbaity articles and spam articles and videos, machine learning technology was enabled to remove them.
For the social media users, the social networking giant gave them an option to compare the agenda of different political parties in their NewsFeed. Other than that an Election Hub was launched on Facebook. This gave the people to see their representatives and their election ballot. This was followed by in-app notifications to know more about their representative.
Other than this, it also worked with the government authorities to work on online security issues, which included training. Moreover, it worked in collaboration with media houses. Infact, the media houses could stream Facebook Lives in Facebook's offices using its facilities.
The social media giant Facebook had launched its much hyped "fake news" crackdown initiative in the US, tagging as "disputed" the stories that are deemed false by fact checking organisations, the media reported on Sunday. The new feature uses non-partisan third-party organisations like Snopes and Politifact to assess the factual accuracy of stories reported as fake by users.
Mark Zuckerberg in a Facebook status had said, "The integrity of our elections is fundamental to democracy around the world. That's why we've built teams dedicated to working on election integrity and preventing governments from interfering in the elections of other nations. "
Published Date: Sep 28, 2017 09:44 am | Updated Date: Sep 28, 2017 09:44 am
