·      Social science and Misinformation Request for Proposals – Facebook has opened an application portal for individuals with established experience studying online interaction and information technologies, as well as from persons seeking to expand their existing research to submit independent research proposal in which the applicant must develop conceptual tools, that gathers and analyses data.[3] The program shall make unrestricted awards up to $50,000 per research proposal.[4]

·      Tab labelled “Page Info and Ads” – The information about the business: the names used in the past, how often the name has been changed, and when the created page is made available. Users can check out the ads that the page is currently running, including the ones that are not shown to them. They can filter the ads by country and flag content that they deem inappropriate, on grounds such as violent, sexually explicit, misleading, or any other criteria.[5]

Comment: “Presenting audiences with context is helpful but it does nothing to stop the spread of this material, or to stop traffic going to fake news peddlers who are making money out of creating this material.“[6]

·      All election based ads on Facebook and Instagram must be labelled and have a “paid for by” disclaimer. Users can click through to an archive, which will show the campaign budget for that specific ad, how many people saw it, and more details about viewers including age, gender and location. The archive will store this information for seven years. [7]

·      Political advertisers in the United States will have to affirm their identity and location, following an announcement in April that requires verification for people buying political ads.[8]

Comment: Facebook has a broad definition of political content and therefore, any content that vaguely relates to the political system would require the disclaimer.

Query: How does the archive help? The archive has been created “to help ensure people know who is trying to share messages with them”[9]. The comment from the Facebook stakeholder, indicates that the purpose is ensure transparency in the network.

·      Issue based ads: Facebook created an initial list of 20 political issues such as civil rights, education, guns, immigration, social security, terrorism and many more,[10] that will require disclosures if they have the goal of influencing public debate, promoting a ballot measure, or electing a candidate.[11]

Comment: Thought, there has been a lot of changes concerning the rules to publish posts or stories on FB, it is still way too easy to become a fake news publisher.[12]

·      Fact checking tool: Partnering with third-party experts trained in visual verification, the company will flag images that have been posted on Facebook in a misleading context, such as, a photo of a previous natural disaster or shooting that is displayed as a present-day event.[13]

Use of machine-learning tools to identify duplicates of debunked stories.[14]

·      Third Party Fact Checking Program: Facebook announced a pilot launch of its fact-checking program in the Indian state of Karnataka. Karnataka accounts for only 4.8 percent of the country’s population — Svensson said that they are “starting small but do hope to expand beyond Karnataka.“[15]

·      Local debunking site BOOM will fact-check questionable posts on the platform.[16]

·      Facebook has now expanded its fact checking program across the country, partnering with AFP.[17]

·      It is now being extended to photos and videos as well.[18] They have built a machine learning model that uses various engagement signals, including feedback from people on Facebook, to identify potentially false content. Those photos and videos are then sent to fact-checkers for their review, or fact-checkers can surface content on their own.

·      Apart from it, OCR technology is used to extract content from the photos and videos and detect if the same was manipulated.

Query: How are the posts selected? The type of posts that are fact-checked are based on the flagging of the posts by the users of the platform. Once it has been flagged, the post is fact checked.

Photos and videos are categorised into (1) Manipulated or Fabricated, (2) Out of Context, and (3) Text or Audio Claim. Facebook keeps a tab on method through which such false news are spread (US- more of photos than content), which are then analysed and fact checked.

Other Jurisdictions:

US – Facebook is associated with ABC News, Associated Press, FactCheck.org, PolitiFact and Snopes.

India – It has associated with BOOM Live and AFP, a Mumbai-based Fact checking organisation. The other countries where similar programs exist are Philipines, France, Indonesia, Columbia, Canada, Netherlands, Germany, Mexico and Italy. [19]

·      Facebook is rolling out a new feature that alerts users of articles that include “disputed content”, wherein any attempt to open the link of the story is prompted with a red alert stating that the article was disputed.^[20]

·      Exploring the opportunity to label stories that have been flagged as false by third parties or the community, and showing warnings when people read or share them.[21]

According to Craig Silverman (Buzzfeed), the spread of fake news reduces by 80% once it has been at least debunked by 2 fact checkers. However, the label of fake news takes about 3 days to appear, in the duration of which fake news already has had made impact.[22]

·      Social science and Misinformation Request for Proposals – Facebook had opened an application portal for individuals with established experience studying online interaction and information technologies, as well as from persons seeking to expand their existing research to submit independent research proposal in which the applicant must develop conceptual tools, that gathers and analyses data.[23] The program announced unrestricted awards up to $50,000 per research proposal.[24]

·      Begun an exercise with academia to study how misinformation is spread in the country.[25]

·      Started an education campaign in India to spot fake news and rumours. “Our first step is placing newspaper advertisements in English and Hindi and several other languages,” the statement said. “We will build on these efforts.”[26]

·      Run television campaign in 9 languages. Series of 3 films to be broadcasted on YouTube, Facebook and TV.[27]

·      Whatsapp has invested in print advertising and has also resolved to continue to strengthen its antispam detection to ban accounts that engage in unwanted automated activity.[28]

·      WhatsApp has now proposed the use of machine learning techniques to identify malicious content. It was testing a method to identify ‘forwards’.[29]

·      Has now restricted ‘forward’ to 5 persons at a time. Has stopped fast-forwarding feature on any video content.[30]

·      Working along with BOOM Live for Fact checking.[31]

·      Forwards label: Help users identify if a text or a video has been forwarded by another user and not originally composed.[32]

·      Suspicious Link Detection: The suspicious link indicator or a red suspicious link label will warn users of a link that might contain a “combination of characters that is considered unusual”. WhatsApp alerts the reader stating “this link contains unusual characters. It may be trying to appear as another site.” From here, the user will have two options, either to open the link or to go back.[33]

Comment: Fake news will still spread. It might have taken two to three hours to reach 100,000 people earlier. With the label, it might increase by two or three times, but this would not be enough.[34] New feature put the onus on people to find out whether a news or message is fake, but people don’t really bother. Also, many people in semi-urban and rural areas don’t have the ability to spot a false message.[35]

Further Implementations[36]

·       To hire an associate general counsel or legal head in India.

·       Has appointed grievance officer.[37] The users can reach out to the support team to escalate their complaints.

Twitter is testing a secret, encrypted messaging option, titled “Secret Conversation”.^[39]

·      Twitter has recently solicited requests from third party researchers and academicians to help improve the health of the conversation on Twitter globally. They are currently evaluating these proposals.[40]

·      Ads Transparency Center: When a user searches for any advertiser, the user will be able to see all ads that are currently running on Twitter, including Promoted-only Tweets, and if an ad was suspended and why.[41]

·      Political Campaigning Policy: Twitter permits political campaigning advertising but there may be additional country level restrictions. In addition to Twitter Ads policies, all political advertisers must comply with applicable laws regarding disclosure and content requirements, eligibility restrictions, and blackout dates for the countries where they advertise.[42]

·      If user searches for advertisers running campaigns for federal elections, the user will be able to see additional details, including the identity of the organization funding the campaign and ad targeting demographics.[43]

·      Twitter is still trying to understand how the fake news is receiving such a massive visibility in the media and where the same is origination from.^[44]

·      There are talks about installing AI mechanism to curb fake news issues.

·      Contemplation regarding inserting ‘edit’ option is surfacing. However, it is debated since someone else can retweet original tweet before editing and information be spread what author did not truly intend.[45]

·      Attempt made to curb fake news before 2019 elections.

·      Fact checking organisations: Multiple organisations are developing plug-ins or tools to identify, chart and comment on the fake news. Ex – FactPopUp, Hoax, Fact Check Review, etc.

·      The app’s news section, Discover, is limited to professionally edited content, including dozens of channels maintained by old-media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, the Daily Mail, the Economist, and People. Snapchat’s coverage of college campuses is overseen by a group of student-run daily newspapers. Its three regular newscasts come from CNN, NBC, and E!.

·      Separate social media content from news media.

·      Snapchat comment: “If an individual story gets hundreds of thousands of views, a team of our editors looks at it”.[47] Once these stories received wide visibility, these stories are reviewed by a team.

·      Snapchat does not use algorithms to try to keep people clicking on new material; the only posts that the users views when glancing at the app is either come from the friends or been vetted for Our Stories. [48]

·      Political content: reviewed political and advocacy ads manually and included information about who paid for them.[49]

However, it has introduced various features that may help in establishing genuine-ness of the circulated news.[52]

·       Verification badge against the accounts with large followings.

·       ‘About this account’ feature which discloses the country run from, date of joining, shared followers, ads the account runs.

·       Proposed to allow people to log in using third party authenticating apps to increase security.

·      Apart from blocking the posts directly, Tencent’s WeChat is working with hundreds of third-party organisations to block postings and quash “rumours” as part of its overall effort to “safeguard cybersecurity”, according to a report released on Friday by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology.[54]

·      WeChat has launched a new feature that warns users if a news item circulating on its accounts is false. The feature will notify users if a piece of news that they have received is deemed fake by Chinese censors, police or official media outlets. Users will also be notified if a news item they send to their friends is later found to be false.[55]

Ad Hoc Projects[56]

·      No Melon: guerrilla debunking project.

·      Anti- rumour project: publishes 3-4 fact checks per week. Articles spread 100 times slower.

·      The goal of the initiative is “to battle information pollution and so-called ‘fake news’ online” to restore public trust and make the Internet a healthier place.”[57]

·      In the initiative, Mozilla has used the following Products[58] to assist in its rehabilitation of the Internet:

1.     Pocket: Maintain a list of articles that will allow the person to read later.

2.     Firefox Focus: a mobile private browsing app

3.     Coral Project: provides tools designated to “raise public trust in journalism” and make it more relevant.

·      Literacy[59]: Mozilla will develop a web literacy curriculum that addresses misinformation and will continue investing in existing projects like the Mission: Information Teaching Kit.

·      Research[60]: Mozilla will be releasing original research on how misinformation impacts users’ experiences online, drawing upon the dataset of user-level browsing data gathered during the 2016 U.S. Elections.

·      Creative Interventions[61]: Mozilla will field and fund pitches from technologists who are combatting misinformation using various mediums, including virtual reality and augmented reality.

·      There are three specific goals of the initiative: (i) highlight accurate journalism while fighting misinformation, (ii) help news sites continue to grow from a business perspective; and (iii) create new tools to help journalists do their jobs.

·      Train nearly 8000 journalists on how to fight fake news and misinformation.[63]

·      Introduce ‘authoritative content’ on YouTube.

·      Proposal to provide a short preview of news articles in search results on YouTube that link to the article during the initial hours of a major news event, along with a reminder that breaking and developing news can rapidly change. (Rolled out in US to test).[64]

Disinfo Lab

·      It is an association with a news organisation called as First Draft, to combat fake news during elections and breaking news.

MediaWise

·      It is an initiative where Google is working along with Poynter Institute, Stanford University, and the Local Media Association to create a program for younger readers to improve digital media literacy.

Subscribe with Google

·      It is a service provided by Google which makes it easier for people to subscribe to online news sites like The New York Times or the Financial Times.

Outline

·      An open-source tool from the company’s technology incubator Jigsaw that makes it easy for news organizations to create VPNs for journalists and provide them with more secure access to the internet.

Chrome[65]

·      Has an extension: FakerFact- to check fake news.

·      Uses machine learning algorithm which has read millions of articles from sites all over internet and trained to detect fake news patterns.

·      Helps in identifying the content seen on the page open: good journalism, satire, conspiracy, opinions, etc.

·      To create a platform in which oft-misinterpreted texts are responsibly annotated by people in the know, hopefully robbing extremists of one of their most potent tools.

·      It has decided to encourage actual humans to get involved in creating a better-informed populace.

·      First implementation of it will be focused on fighting Islamic extremism and Islamophobia, with other religions, cultures and even politics mappable on the same platform as the respective communities join.[67]

·      Build “knowledge graph”- introduce objective subjectivity.

·      There are three parts in the ecosystem that Ananas is built on:

1.     Community that allows for a constructive dialogue and interaction between individuals of disparate groups.

2.     Data platform where information will be collated for verification allowing for ‘Anacoin’ rewards.

3.     Consumer facing apps which allow anyone in the world to access the information for free.

·      Anancoin building[69]:

1.     Collect all existing digital and real world resources and attaching them to a framework

2.     Figure out which parts don’t come together and need to be filled.

3.     Commission new resources to be created to fill these gaps.

4.     Check the quality of individual components to see where they could be improved and ordering them.

5.     Improve the quality of selected resources in a guided manner.

·      Connected with 4500 publishers across the globe to verify the news content.

·      Handles about 170,000 pieces of content each day.

·      Also uses machine learning and AI to combat fake news.

Microsoft Edge[71]

·      Announced collaboration with NewsGuard.

·      In its rolling phases.

·       BBC has come out with its own special Indian coverage to help India fight fake news crisis and provide fact checking services during the 2019 elections.

·       Making even greater efforts to explain what type of information you are reading or watching, who and where the information is coming from and how a story was crafted the way it was.

Initiatives

·       Launching a global ‘Beyond Fake News’ project which includes workshops to school pupils and college students in various locations across India.

·       Working with Google, Twitter and Indian chat platforms (primarily Whatsapp) to research on fundamental drivers of fake news.

(Verified Signatory to the International Fact-Checking Network @ Poynter)

·      An independent digital journalism initiative committed to bring to readers verified facts rather than opinion that provides the service of fact checking.

1.     Select a claim to fact check

2.     Trace the source of the claim

3.     Contact the source

4.     Look for evidence and data to support or knock down a claim

5.     Speak to experts/people in the know

6.     Write a fact check

7.     Correct mistakes promptly and openly

·      It is associated with Facebook as part of third party fact-checking program to help tackle the spread of fake news with a pilot in the state of Karnataka for the state elections.[75]

·      An antidote to fake news and political propaganda rampant on social media as well as mainstream media. It focuses on:

1.     Political fact-checking

2.     Social Media Rumours

3.     Mainstream media misinformation and bias

1.     Selecting a claim to debunk

2.     Researching the claim

3.     Evaluation the claim

4.     Writing the fact check

5.     Updating the articles

(Verified Signatory to the International Fact-Checking Network @ Poynter)

·      Initiative of The Spending & Policy Research Foundation that has been scrutinizing and researching for veracity and context statements made by individuals in public life on issues such as health, sanitation, law and justice, education, environment, employment, innovation, science, environment and disadvantaged groups.

·      Picks claims made by public figures or government reports

·      Checks for veracity and context through reference to official data in public domain

·      Provide context, in cases missing

(Verified Signatory to the International Fact-Checking Network @ Poynter)

·      Founded by David Mikkelson in the year 1994 is the oldest and largest fact checking website on the Internet – one widely regarded by journalists, folklorists, and laypersons alike as one of the world’s essential resources.

·      Each of the entries in our collated list of popular topics is assigned to one of the members of our editorial staff, who undertakes the preliminary background research and writes the first draft of the fact-check evaluation.

·      Depending upon the nature and complexity of the topic, other members of the editorial staff may contribute additional research (or their own personal expertise) and editing.

·      The final product will pass through the hands of at least one line/copy editor who reviews it for style and consistency (e.g., issues such as spelling, punctuation, grammar, adherence to style guide) and at least two content editors who review the work to ensure it is adequately comprehensive in its coverage of the topic.

(Verified Signatory to the International Fact-Checking Network @ Poynter)

·      A project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, the site seeks to validate or debunk claims made by public officials, especially elected representatives, to hold them responsible for their words and actions.

·      It investigates political ads, debates, speeches, interviews and news-releases by various political parties, organizations, candidates and lobby groups to make sure that public discourse in the country remains accurate and factual in these increasingly fact-free times.[82]

1.     Topics – based on the election cycle

2.     Selection – reviewing claims made by the Democrats and Republicans in the same venues.

3.     Research – Use transcripts and videos concerning the statements

4.     Editing – There is line edition, copy editing and Fact-checking that occurs after the story is written.

5.     Correction Policy – in case a new information comes to light, the story is updated with a clarification.

·      The goal of the Hoax-Slayer Website is to help make the Internet a safer, more pleasant and more productive environment by:

o   Debunking email and Internet hoaxes

o   Thwarting Internet scammers

o   Educating web users about email and Internet security issues

o   Combating spam

·      We write about topics that are trending online or have been submitted by readers via email and social media.

·      thoroughly research all articles

·      include in-text hyperlinks and a separate reference list

(Verified Signatory to the International Fact-Checking Network @ Poynter)

·       Independent news organisation which is the news and content platform of World Mobile News Network Pvt Ltd.

·       Has a special section for fact checker which debunks fake news.

·       Active on- Twitter, Facebook, Instagram.

Methodology

·       When a claim has been brought to its notice, it checks for its factual accuracy. They check the importance of the story, how likely is it to damage the situation, how potentially dangerous it can turn out to be.

·       Then the source of the claim is tracked. If a public figure/ authority has made a claim, they are reached out directly to confirm the claim.

·       There is a panel of experts who help in confirming technicalities of an issue.

·       Fact sheet is prepared and based on it, news it put out.

Transparency

·       Fact checking hotline WhatsApp number available wherein readers can forward news they would like to be fact checked. Provision to email also available.

·       ‘Editor’s note’ added at the end of stories that have been corrected.

·       Is an independent digital journalism initiative of a Company registered in India. Has a separate dedicated team solely working for fact checking news/claims.

Methodology

·       Article is published on its site.

·       It is made available for public review. It is fact checked by the team, corrected and verified, then re-uploaded usually within 10 days.

·       If claims against has been brought about by public, correction process is initiated, article is re-uploaded again with verified content usually within 10 days.

·       Complaints can be sent through comment form, contact us form, submit for factcheck page or through email.