After announcing an upcoming dating app to rival Tinder, Facebook plans to do some more creeping of its own, now scoring its users’ trustworthiness on a scale from zero to one.
The newly announced rating process, according to Facebook’s product manager Tessa Lyons, has been tested in the past year in an attempt to challenge fake news and misinformation, according to the Washington Post.
While it’s still unclear what criteria Facebook will use to determine its users’ ratings, Lyons clarified that a user’s trustworthiness score is not considered to be one’s absolute credibility index – instead, the score will be one among many behavioural factors used by the app to understand what profiles are more likely to flag other users’ content, or what accounts are considered reliable by others. The social network still heavily relies on users helping them weed out fake news.
Facebook, that introduced the ‘report’ option in 2015 (that enabled accounts to flag up content deemed violent, pornographic, hate speech or fake news), found it was “not uncommon for people to tell us something is false simply because they disagree with the premise of a story or they’re intentionally trying to target a particular publisher,” Lyons said in an interview.
Since then, the social platform with over two billion active users has announced new measures against fake stories. Introducing a new fact-checking system involving third party verification experts, Facebook has enlisted over 24 fact-checking organisations from 14 countries.
As shitty as this trustworthiness rating system may sound, it could actually hinder abuse and harassment on the platform. Routinely, far-right trolls use the reporting tool to harass other users. You won’t ever find out what your score is though.