Facebook to bring new feature that notifies people sharing misinformation on COVID-19

In an attempt to contain misinformation on the coronavirus pandemic, social networking giant Facebook on Thursday stressed that it will soon start showing messages in News Feed to the people who have previously engaged with misinformation that has already been removed from the platform. They will also be shown the correct information, the company said.

In a Facebook post, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the new feature, called Get The Facts, will debunk misinformation about the COVID-19 crisis. This will be part of a section of the company's COVID-19 Information Centre featuring articles written by independent fact-checking partners.

"We're also launching a new feature called Get The Facts, a section of our COVID-19 Information Center featuring articles written by independent fact-checking partners debunking misinformation about the coronavirus. We will also soon begin showing messages in News Feed to people who previously engaged with harmful misinformation related to COVID-19 that we’ve since removed, connecting them with accurate information," the CEO wrote.

He further added that over 2 billion people on Facebook and the company's image sharing platform Instagram have been redirected to authoritative health resources.

"On Facebook and Instagram, we've now directed more than 2 billion people to authoritative health resources via our COVID-19 Information Center and educational pop-ups, with more than 350 million people clicking through to learn more. We're also continuing our efforts to reduce misinformation. Since the beginning of March, we've expanded our fact-checking coverage to more than a dozen new countries and now work with over 60 fact-checking organizations that review content in more than 50 languages," the post added.

Zuckerberg also explained a piece of content will be taken down from the platform if it contains misinformation that could lead to imminent physical harm. "We've taken down hundreds of thousands of pieces of misinformation related to COVID-19, including theories like drinking bleach cures the virus or that physical distancing is ineffective at preventing the disease from spreading."

"For other misinformation, once it is rated false by fact-checkers, we reduce its distribution, apply warning labels with more context and find duplicates. In March, we displayed warnings on about 40 million posts related to Covid-19 based on 4,000 articles reviewed by independent fact-checkers. When people saw those warning labels, 95% of the time they did not go on to view the original content," he further added.

In India, the Press Information Bureau has been fact-checking social media posts that are spreading fake news and debunking them through different channels. It has also urged people not to believe such messages and only trust the offiial information provided by the govenrment.