With two large-scale US elections in India next year, Threads aims to introduce a fact-checking program to the social network.
Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri he said that the social networking platform currently matches reviews from Facebook or Instagram with similar content; But next year fact checkers will have tools to check posts.
“We currently match fact-checking ratings from Facebook or Instagram with Threads, but our goal is for fact-checking partners to be able to check and rate misinformation in the app,” he told one post.
Separately, Meta participated a blog post that soon US-based Threads users will be able to increase, decrease, or keep the same demote level on content-controlled posts. The company said that if users had applied settings on Instagram to not see sensitive content, it would carry over to Threads.
Meta and Threads did not want to amplify the news on the platform. However, the company should keep misinformation under control — especially during election season. In October, Mosseri said that while Threads is not “anti-news,” it is “not going to amplify news on the platform.”
It’s worth noting that the site still blocks searches for keywords including “covid” and “covid-19” — first reported by the Washington Post In September.
With features like tags (without the hash symbol) and trendy themes (which haven’t been released yet), users will have more ways to search and spread information. Meta has come under fire in the past for spreading misinformation on its platform. So the company takes timely measures to avoid such mishaps again.
However, until Meta provides more details about the program, there will be many questions surrounding it, ranging from the nature of flagging misinformation posts to ways to display correct and contextual information. And while Threads has stayed out of the news so far, data audit programs should get involved.
