14 DAY TRIAL // First, Facebook started off by saying it wants to fight against fake news. Now, the social network wants to help people trust real news again.
How does it plan to do that? Well, it starts off by launching a $14 million program called the "News Integrity Initiative."
In collaboration with the likes of Mozilla, Craig Newmark (Craiglist founder), the Knight Foundation, the Tow Foundation, City University of New York and others, Facebook has begun working on this new project that deepens its involvement in the news.
The company has spent many years so far denying that it had anything to do with the news and saying it could not be categorized as such. On the other hand, it seems to be coming to terms with the fact that people will share news over Facebook, so much, in fact, that it has become the most dominant platform for news.
Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, event went on to say that Facebook and Google should be the ones leading the fight against fake news due to the size of the masses they reach.
Lots of pressure on Facebook
Nonetheless, Facebook has been heavily criticized for what has happened over its platform in recent years, particularly as false information runs riot among people who don't exactly know how to pick their sources.
"We’re excited to announce we are helping to found and fund the News Integrity Initiative, a diverse new network of partners who will work together to focus on news literacy. The initiative will address the problems of misinformation, disinformation and the opportunities the internet provides to inform the public conversation in new ways," reads the announcement signed by Campbell Brown, the head of News Partnerships at Facebook.
Jeff Jarvis, professor of journalism at CUNY and one of the leaders of the initiative, says that this isn't a problem that's exclusive to Facebook.
"My greatest hope is that this Initiative will provide the opportunity to work with Facebook and other platforms on reimagining news, on supporting innovation, on sharing data to study the public conversation, and on supporting news literacy broadly defined," Jarvis wrote in a blog post.