Journalism charity calls for Facebook scheme to be extended

Fact-checking, recently put in place by Facebook, should be extended to Instagram, says a journalism charity.

The social media giant has put in place a fact-checking system to check the veracity of certain posts following fake news concerns over the last few years.

This involves organisations, charities and individuals signing up to the scheme to monitor sketchy content or content that has been earmarked as dubious.

Now Full Fact, the only UK member of the scheme, is calling for Facebook to extend it to Instagram which the social media giant owns.

“We do not see why the third-party fact-checking programme cannot be fully expanded to Instagram,” Full Fact said in its report on the first six months of the programme. “The potential to prevent harm is high here, and there are known risks of health misinformation on the platform.”

The charity is paid by Facebook to provide the fact-checking service. Its report listed nine other recommendations for how Facebook could improve its programme.

Full Fact can check Instagram content, these checks have no effect on content directly. They only have an impact if links to Instagram content are posted on Facebook.

Facebook said: “We know there’s always room to improve. This includes scaling the impact of fact checks through identical content matching and similarity detection, continuing to evolve our rating scale to account for a growing spectrum of types of misinformation, piloting ways to utilise fact-checkers’ signals on Instagram and more.”