December 2, 2016:Â Facebook is to use artificial intelligence (AI) to effectively weed out fake news from users’ newsfeeds.
Facebook has been the hot target of several publications of late, with generous blame issued on its erring newsfeed algorithm that fails to sort out fake news from real news. The rise of fake news on the network, according to several opinion articles in newspapers, was the reason behind President-elect Donald Trump’s victory in the recently concluded U.S. election.
Though Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg has denied the claims, it doesn’t take a genius to infer from the amount of offensive posts and sensitive content on the site that the company sorely needs to update its algorithm to properly send fake news and sensitive down the bin.
Yann LeCun, Facebook’s director for AI research, has said that the technology could be implemented to eliminate fake news and at the same time detect violence in live videos by virtue of content filtration on the site.
The problem is Facebook hasn’t quite figured out how to introduce AI responsibly.
Facebook has mostly relied on its users to report sensitive media. But this could change soon. The company could soon flag offensive content in live video automatically, as it works on implementing AI to comb content, said Joaquin Candela, Facebook’s director for applied machine learning.
Facebook has invested in AI since 2013.
At present, Facebook’s AI technology detects words from links that might simply be fishing for clicks, or so-called clickbait articles.
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