The concept of social media epitomizes the limitless nature of technology like nothing else. At the start, there were certainly doubts about how far this idea will go, but we have come a long way from that point. In fact, social media platforms have become so comprehensive that now they transcend the intention of just socializing. Today, these platforms pretty much run the world. Every sector that is required to have some level of interaction with the final consumer relies on them for not just a marketing push, but also for establishing credibility. This perfectly describes the kind of importance it has clocked in our lives, and say what, the graph of it is only expected to go further up. However, social media’s growing significance hasn’t stopped it from landing in hot waters time and again. One of its biggest criticisms to this day has been the rampant spread of misinformation that these media platforms facilitate. The said issue has caused severe problems, and we only have to look at what happened during the Covid 19 pandemic to understand it. If the nature of information is sensitive enough, then any ill-use of it can even have life-threatening consequences. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Twitter etc have come under fire over the past for this exact reason, and it looks like after much deliberation, they are finally ready to respond.
On Thursday, Facebook officially announced its intention to take strict measures against the accounts that have shown a consistent pattern of spreading false information. Even though the popular social media platform already has a set of policies in place that prohibit harmful content like hate speech, harassment, and sharing of fake information, its current setup leaves out a ton of loopholes that you can easily exploit. For instance, an individual account might get its content taken off, if even a single policy is violated, but the Facebook’s AI technology hasn’t been able to do that with the things posted by a group of organized accounts. The company plans to make amends on this front.
Facebook’s security team will be tasked with the job of scouring such group of accounts. In response to the wrong facts presented by them, Facebook would look at measures like reducing the reach of their content or disable their accounts entirely.
“We recognize this challenge is complex. We need to be careful and deliberate when tackling coordinated efforts by authentic users in order to distinguish between people who organically come together to organize for social change and the types of adversarial networks that can cause digital harm,” David Agranovich, director of threat disruption at Facebook.
Agranovich also mentioned that they will be taking many things into consideration before finalizing any action. While a long history of spreading inaccurate information is a factor, Agranovich mentioned the company will also put some stock in ‘technical signals’