Facebook to work with AFP to monitor fake news in Cyprus

Facebook has announced that it will be working with the French news agency Agence France Presse (AFP) as an independent fact checker for Greek-speaking Cyprus and Greece.

The social media giant currently works with AFP in 18 countries in Europe. AFP is a certified body belonging to the International Fact-Finding Network.

It also announced the launch of a new educational advertising campaign lasting two weeks in Cyprus in order to highlight the way it works with fact checkers and how to detect false information on the internet.

Facebook’s fact-checking programme includes more than 80 partners around the world, checking content in more than 60 different languages.

“These collaborators play a key role in detecting misinformation that nevertheless manages to go viral,” the announcement said.

When an event controller evaluates a story as false, Facebook adds a warning tag to the content and significantly reduces its distribution.

“In addition, pages and domains that repeatedly post fake news will see their distribution reduced, while their ability to advertise and generate revenue will be taken away,” it added.

Facebook has adopted a three-part strategy to tackle misinformation, it said. It removes content that violates the Facebook and Instagram Community Terms or their Advertising Policies, it reduces the amount of fake news and non-genuine content, and informs the public, offering them alternative content about the context of the posts they see.

“This strategy has been particularly important in tackling health-related misinformation effectively,” the announcement said.

Since the pandemic began, Facebook has removed more than 18 million articles because it said they violated its Covid-19 misinformation rules. Warning tags have also been applied to more than 167 million posts.

“It is worth noting that when a warning tag is placed on a post, 95 per cent of the time users do not click on it to see it,” the announcement added.

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