Facebook has rolled out a new campaign in East African countries including Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Ethiopia to enlighten people on how to detect potential false news.
Now more than ever Facebook says that they are working to connect people to accurate sources, and show less misinformation — especially about COVID-19. Facebook has made significant investments to remove accounts and content that violate its Community Standards or Ad Policies; reduce the distribution of false news, and inform people by giving them more context on the posts they see — so people can decide what to read, trust, and share.
In consultation with its fact-checking partners, the company has developed ‘Three Questions To Help Stamp Out False News’, which will show up on Facebook through a series of creative adverts, and link out to a dedicated website, www.stampoutfalsenews.com. These adverts will ask people to challenge the information they see on posts by asking themselves the following:
- Where’s it from? If there’s no source, search for one.
- What’s missing? Get the whole story, not just the headline.
- How does it make you feel? People who make false news try to manipulate feelings.
The campaign is first being rolled-out to people across the East African region; Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Ethiopia as well as EU, the UK, and countries across the Middle East, Africa and Turkey.
To assess the effectiveness of these campaigns in helping people better understand what to trust, Facebook will follow this campaign with surveys to ask what people have learned. This information will help Facebook create more of these media literacy initiatives in the future.
This campaign comes high on the heels of last month’s context notification update, which lets people know when the news articles they are about to share are older than 90 days. Updates like this ensure that people have the context they need to make informed decisions about what to pass on to others on Facebook.
Through this COVID-19 pandemic and beyond, the social media company says that they will continue working with industry experts and people on their platforms to ensure they are effectively tackling misinformation in this way, and giving them the resources they need to help spot and challenge the content they are seeing online.
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