Facebook Adds Trust Indicators to Articles
Facebook steps up its fight against fake news, this time by letting readers scrutinize for themselves the sources for articles posted on the platform. This new "trust indicator" comes in the form of an icon that leads to an overview about the article's publisher.
This icon lays out how a publisher has completed a set of credibility indicators, as prescribed by the Trust Project. This endeavor, as described by the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics in the Santa Clara University, places readers like Facebook users at the center of the fake news debate.
These indicators revolve around user needs for outlets that are "objective, unbiased, no agenda, discloses conflict of interest" and "independent of business, government pressures," among others.
Based on this checklist of sorts, Facebook has added a section about publishers for them to state their ethics, corrections, and fact-checking policies, as shown in a screencap in their news update.
The same page also requires publishers to disclose their ownership structure and add their official masthead at the end.
The information from this section that is shown to readers when they click on a Trust Indicator icon on an article in their news feed, at least starting with a small group of publishers for now.
"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 said in a statement. The social media platform added that it will expand the feature to other news posters over time.
Aside from helping publishers promote their journalism standards, Facebook is also helping them earn revenue in the form of subscriptions.
"We can't do that without journalists, but we also know that new technologies can make it harder for publishers to fund the journalism we all rely on," Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said in his statement as the company introduced its Journalism Project last month.
