Facebook and Twitter are social competitors for most parts. However, the two social powerhouses have joined hands with 30 plus news agencies including New York Times, Washington Post and CNN in a bid to help control the spread of bogus news and misguiding information.
This joint action will help in not only improving the quality of news that is updated to social sites but more importantly it will help responsible agencies in ensuring that fake news or incorrect information does not spread and cause unfair biases among the reading audiences.
A number of media reports quoted Jenni Sargent, managing director of First Draft Coalition, an Alphabet-backed venture staging “Filtering out false information can be hard. Even if news organisations only share fact-checked and verified stories, everyone is a publisher and a potential source. We are not going to solve these problems over night, but we’re certainly not going to solve them as individual organisations.”
Participation by social media giants Facebook and Twitter is necessary if the circulation of bogus news has to be controlled. Both sites are leading go-to-sources for latest and trending news. A Pew Research study found that these sites are the most preferred place for keeping a track of latest news for adult Americans’ across the globe.
Although one cannot expect overnight success, the joint participation by social and print news sites and distribution outlets can go a long way in controlling the menace of the spread of bogus or incorrect news.
