Fake news has been a recurring problem in social media sites and has led massive Internet companies like Facebook and Google to come up with solutions to this problem.
Facebook has not been shy in trying to come up with tools to weed out fake news from the NewsFeed. Misinformation is not beneficial to Facebook at all since people might end up trusting it less as a news source and the fact that the company has invested a lot to be a news source cannot be let undone in a short while.
In Kenya, we are nearing the date for the General Elections and we are at a time when people will be sharing content about candidates that might not be truthful. Facebook now will roll out a tool in the News Feed that will help Kenyans spot false news on the network.
The tool will be available from today for a few days in both English and Swahili and will be shown to the 7 million Kenyans who use Facebook every month. That is now all, they will also collaborate with WhatsApp to place notices in the national newspapers and radio stations on how to spot fake news.
“We take fighting fake news issues seriously, because people want to see accurate information on Facebook,” Ebele Okobi, Director of Policy for Facebook Africa said. “We’ve developed a three part strategy to stop the spread of misinformation, disrupting the economic incentives for the spammers who attempt to distribute false news, building new products and helping people better identify false news and report it.”
A study done by Geopoll found out that Kenyans don’t trust news about the General Elections shared on social media, so this move by Facebook is a step in the right direction.
