A coalition of left-leaning tech giants will team up with progressive media outlets in order to “train journalists” and protect the public from “false information,” according to an announcement made Tuesday.
“Filtering out false information can be hard. Even if news organizations only share fact-checked and verified stories, everyone is a publisher and a potential source,” Jenni Sargent, managing director of Google’s First Draft News, wrote in a Tuesday blog post. “We are not going to solve these problems overnight, but we’re certainly not going to solve them as individual organizations.”
A few of those involved with the effort include Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, the New York Times, the Washington Post, BuzzFeed News, CNN, Agence France-Presse and al Jazeera. Sargent explained that the coalition would seek to launch “a collaborative verification platform” as well as a “voluntary code of practice.”
“This network will also create a feedback loop for representatives from each social media platform to connect with journalists and develop ideas for ways to streamline the verification process, improve the experience of eyewitnesses and increase news literacy amongst social media users,” Sargent added.
The tech giants have increasingly met with criticism for filtering the news they present to users. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg held a meeting with conservative leaders over the summer to convince them his organization would seek to improve. Twitter has met with similar criticism, both for censoring content and banning conservative users, but has done less to address these complaints.
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Facebook recently eliminated human operators from its news curation process, and algorithms used to sort content have subsequently allowed some fake stories to emerge in the site’s trending news section.
A Tuesday story from one of the initiative’s participants, Agence France-Press, noted the issue with fake news stories on Facebook, but omitted any mention about the allegations of liberal bias. “The announcement comes amid concerns over the growing role of social networks, especially Facebook, in delivering and filtering news, and sometimes allowing hoaxes and misinformation to proliferate,” AFP noted.
Sargent said in her blog post the coalition’s aim was to improve journalistic quality and content. “Each partner is committed to sharing knowledge, developing policies and devising training in how journalists use the social web to find and report news,” she wrote.
