Facebook's 'Trust Indicators' is another small, small step in its fake news battle
Facebook wants you to know what's fake news and what's not (supposedly) so it is embracing another tool: "Trust Indicators." The tool was created in partnership with the Trust Project, an international consortium of news and digital companies.
It's a fancy name, but it's actually a small move hidden within a little feature. The tiny "i" icon next to articles on News Feed will now include more information about the media outlet behind that story. Publishers can choose to share their ethics policy, corrections policy, fact-checking policy, ownership structure, and masthead, according to a Facebook spokesperson.
The hope is that Facebook users will click through and read each of those sections.
"We believe that helping people access this important contextual information can help them evaluate if articles are from a publisher they trust, and if the story itself is credible," Facebook product manager Andrew Anker wrote in a blog post.
But the effort is quite problematic. For starters, it's doubtful anyone will actually bother clicking that little icon. Secondly, Facebook isn't granting every publisher access to the tool. Rather, it hand-selected a "small group of publishers." The initial launch has 9 news outlets, with more on the way.
Facebook declined to disclose what publishers were in this test.
"As the blog states, we are currently testing this with a small group of publishers globally to better understand the impact of exposing these indicators to people on Facebook. We plan to scale this out more broadly over the next couple of months," a Facebook spokesperson wrote in an email in response to a query on the names of the publishers involved.
In follow-up emails, Facebook later confirmed that Vox.com (but not necessarily all publishers under Vox Media) and the Associated Press were involved.
Facebook has repeatedly said it cares about authentic news and publisher relations. It launched the Facebook Journalism Project in January. Part of that initiative involves better collaborating with media outlets, creating tools and training for journalists, and launching education efforts for the general public.
But many of these steps have been disappointments. "The problem with Facebook's entire 'news team' is that they're glorified client services people," an attendee at Facebook's F8 conference who works on the digital side of a major news publisher told Mashable in April.
Fact-checkers working with Facebook told The Guardian this week that they've been frustrated with the program. Some fact-checkers said Facebook's "disputed" tag doesn't do much and suggested that Facebook wasn't serious about stopping disinformation.
"They have a big problem, and they are leaning on other organizations to clean up after them," one participant told The Guardian.
Topics Facebook Social Media
Kerry Flynn is a business reporter for Mashable covering the tech industry. She previously reported on social media companies, mobile apps and startups for International Business Times. She has also written for The Huffington Post, Forbes and Money magazine. Kerry studied environmental science and economics at Harvard College, where she led The Harvard Crimson's metro news and design teams and played mellophone in the Band. When not listening to startup pitches, she runs half-marathons, plays with puppies and pretends to like craft beer.
