Facebook Assigning Trust Values To Users Is A Wonderful Idea To Combat Fake News

Facebook says that it has started scoring at least some of its users on a trustworthiness scale. The tech giant said that the trustworthiness scale rates users from a scale of zero to one and it was introduced as one way to reduce the proliferation of fake news on its platform. The company, however, declined to reveal how the score is calculated or the limitations in its use.

A report by the Washington Post said, the rating system is only meant for the company’s own internal use, which means general users will not be able to see their own score or anybody else’s for that matter. But Facebook, disagrees with Washington Post’s description of the new tool, saying that it’s not meant to be a ‘reputation score’ in any way. Facebook spokeswoman said;

The idea that we have a centralized ‘reputation’ score for people that use Facebook is just plain wrong and the headline in the Washington Post is misleading……We developed a process to protect against people indiscriminately flagging news as fake and attempting to game the system. The reason we do this is to make sure that our fight against misinformation is as effective as possible.

The developments come months after the social media giant said that it will introduce crowd-sourced trust ratings for media outlets to help users better distinguish between reliable news and fake news. However, Facebook said it consequently started getting overwhelmed with false reports of fake news, with many people flagging everything they disagree with as ‘fake’.

Because Facebook makes use of third-party fact-checkers to manually check every flagged post, the company has obviously felt the need to develop its own scale to assess whether the people who were flagging posts as false were themselves trustworthy.