Meta’s Public Policy Director, East & Horn of Africa, Mercy Ndegwa, has reiterated the importance of collaboration in the company’s approach to getting rid of false information on their platforms.
Ms Ndegwa, at the Africa Facts Summit, held in Nairobi, Kenya, gave insights into how the platform, through its third-party fact-checking collaboration with African fact-checkers, helps the audience to stay safe in the information ecosystem.
She noted that Facebook classifies misinformation into harmful and not harmful. While it removes the former, it warns users about and reduces the latter’s spread.
She added that Facebook also directs people to authoritative sources for further guidance on making informed decisions.
“We remove content that is likely to contribute to imminent harm. Content that is intended to suppress voting, highly deceptive, and manipulated content (deep fakes). For all other types of misinformation, that’s the type that is not likely to cause harm. When we establish this to be untrue, we reduce the distribution; what that means is this content is likely not going to be visible at the top of the feed. In addition, we also inform people or direct them to authoritative sources,” she said.
Meta’s fight against misinformation is made possible by its partnership with over 80 International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), certified independent fact-checkers worldwide, who review and rate viral misinformation in more than 60 languages.
In Africa alone, the tech company is working with fact-checkers in over 25 countries to ensure further that the spread of mis- and disinformation is curtailed on its platform.
This hasn’t come without a challenge. Ms Ndegwa noted that the company does not have the language capability to address all forms of content posted in various languages worldwide.
“We have so many languages across Africa and even more globally. When you think of a language like Swahili with different dialects that are also all the same, getting to the point where we can say we have full language capability is a challenge, but we are constantly working with partners and others to make sure that we have the capacity to be able to address this.”
Ms Ndegwa said events like the Africa Facts Summit serve as a learning ground for Meta. The company gets to learn and improve on addressing misinformation on Facebook.
“We also want to learn and get better. Meta has very clear steps. The company makes efforts towards addressing problematic content and I can vouch for that because we have over 40 thousand people currently in the company that are focused on security-related roles. We would not be 100% spot-on in everything, and events like this also help us to learn where the challenges could be more,” she said.
