Facebook Rating Credibility of Users Who Report Fake News

Facebook developed the system after many users began reporting news as fake just because they didn't agree with it.

The next time you flag or report a post on Facebook that you consider spam or fake news, be aware, that Facebook will be judging your actions. Apparently, a lot of users flag posts as fake news just because they do not agree with it.

According to a report in The Washington Post, Facebook has begun assigning its users a reputation score between 0 and 1, which will help rate the credibility of its users. This, the social media giant feels, will help weed out the practice of gaming the system - where posts are reported as fake just because some users have a different opinion of them.

It’s not uncommon for people to tell us something is false simply because they disagree with the premise of a story or they’re intentionally trying to target a particular publisher.

Tessa Lyons, Product Manager, Facebook to The Washington Post

However, there is no clarity on the criteria that Facebook uses to rate its users. According to Tessa Lyons, product manager at Facebook, the score is just one measurement among thousands of other behavioural clues that Facebook takes into account. The social media giant is studying which users are likely to flag fake content and also which publishers are considered trustworthy by Facebook users.

After the Cambridge Analytica scandal that has rocked Facebook earlier this year, the company has been proactively trying to fight fake news and spread of disinformation. It recently pulled the plug on 652 pages that it saw as spreading political propaganda with Russian and Iranian influence ahead of the US midterm elections in November.

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So what happens to posts that users mark as false or report on Facebook? The company forwards these posts to third-party fact checkers (part of the 20,000 strong brigade Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg keeps talking about).

However, it has been getting an overwhelming number of reported posts that inundate fact checkers. To make their life easier, Facebook has come up with this rating system to first check the credibility of the user reporting a post.

(With inputs from The Washington Post)