Facebook launching year-long project to fight fake news and educate users on sources to trust

Edgar Welch is arrested in Washington, D.C.,
last month after taking a gun into a pizza
restaurant he thought hid a child sex ring
involving Hillary Clinton. That was a
fake news story he read on the internet.  

Facebook is joining the fight against fake news, Sarah Frier reports for Bloomberg Technology. The popular social media site, which has 1.79 billion users, is launching its Journalism Project, which "includes stronger partnerships with media companies, greater support for local news and better efforts to educate users to avoid hoaxes."

The project will follow "a year of debate over Facebook’s role in the media—inside the company and externally—during which it faced questions over whether the social network is biased in the way it presents news to users and whether it propagates false information," Frier writes. "Members of the media will be updated on the efforts, which include training for journalists and ways to promote news literacy among users, on a new Facebook Journalism Project page."

Facebook officials said they want to educate users "on what news sources to trust—a potentially thorny issue after a controversy last year over its trending topics section, which prioritized news from certain mainstream organizations, but not some popular conservative sites," Frier writes. "The company will work with outside organizations like the News Literacy Project and run public service ads and is open to making financial grants where necessary, Facebook said."