The fake news syndrome is soon overtaking the social media space. Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook is not left out as it is actually on the frontiers of the whole menace.
The social media giant today released a post on how it is fighting against fake news on facebook. This time, a consolidation action has been made to the previously unreported rating systems. Facebook has now begun to assign its users a reputation score, predicting their trustworthiness on a scale from zero to 1.
Prior to now, Facebook deployed a system that allowed users to flag or report fake news such that if more users flagged a post as false, then it is treated as fake. And if otherwise, then the reverse is the case. However, the method was rather overwhelming and ineffective as users abused the opportunity and began to falsely report items as true either based on personal opinions, disagreements or malicious intentions.
The rating system is a way of measuring the credibility of users to help identify malicious actors. The scale of zero to one will be used, although not explicitly explained on how it is to be interpreted but we suppose that the zero is an indicator that a post is true based on the number of report or flags and 1 when it has been proven to be true. Of which, if a post had previously been proven as true but later it is realized as not true then it rate will drop down to zero.
However, Tesse Lyons, the product manager who is in charge of fighting misinformation said in an interview that the users’ worthiness score between zero and 1 isn’t meant to be an absolute indicator of a person’s credibility, nor is there a single unified reputation score that users are assigned.
