Instagram to Rollout New ‘Fact Checking’ Program for Memes and Photos

• Monday, Poynter reported that Facebook will begin reducing the reach of posts on Instagram that any of their 52 fact-checking partner companies deem as “false info.”
• Representing over 30 countries from around the world, these fact-checking companies are in charge of defining, identifying, and rating what they deem as “fake news” to “..stop the spread of disinformation.”
• Facebook, using Poynter as a source, changed its policy recently in a vow to ban users for sharing positive meme’s and content of Alex Jones and InfoWars.

Facebook-owned Instagram will now be fact-checking photos and memes with the same approach that Facebook has used for the last 3 years; rating a link, image or video as false, limiting its future reach in the ‘News Feed,’ and warning users if they try to share it. “When we find misinfo, rather than remove it, we’ll reduce its distribution,” said Stephanie Otway, a spokeswoman for Instagram.

Instagram is a platform used by millions of people so keeping it safe is essential to its users. People can spend hours and hours making their Instagram look perfect and even use a growth service for Instagram to make sure people see all of their hard work. So, making sure the platform is only relaying accurate information is important, otherwise, the platform may be discredited and its users may choose an alternative platform.

More specifically, in practice, Instagram will remove any post that is flagged by any one of the 52 fact-checking partner companies as false from the Explore Tab and its hashtag results page.

YouTuber and political pundit Paul Joseph Watson, who was recently banned on Instagram and Facebook, reported that last year, “Facebook announced the deployment of a large-scale machine learning system named Rosetta, which it’s using to automatically and proactively identify ‘inappropriate or harmful content’ in images on the social network.”