Are you being good?
Facebook is secretly rating you
FACEBOOK is rating users based on how “trustworthy” it thinks they are.
Users receive a score on a scale from zero to one that indicates and determines if they have a good or bad reputation – but it’s completely hidden.
The rating system was revealed in a report by The Washington Post – and later confirmed by Facebook, which says it’s in place to “help identify malicious actors”.
Facebook tracks your behaviour across its site and uses that info to assign you a rating.
Tessa Lyons, who heads up Facebook’s fight against fake news, said: “One of the signals we use is how people interact with articles.
“For example, if someone previously gave us feedback that an article was false and the article was confirmed false by a fact checker, then we might weight that person’s future false news feedback more than someone who indiscriminately provides false news feedback on lots of articles, including ones that end up being rated as true.”
Earlier this year, Facebook admitted it was rolling out trust ratings for media outlets. This involved ranking news websites based on the quality of the news they were reporting.
This rating would then be used to decide which posts should be promoted higher in users’ news feeds.
User ratings are employed in a similar way – helping Facebook make a judgment about the quality of their post reports.
According to Lyons, a user’s rating “isn’t meant to be an absolute indicator of a person’s credibility”.
Instead, it’s intended as a measurement for working out how risky a user’s actions may be.
A Facebook spokesperson told The Sun: “The idea that we have a centralised ‘reputation’ score for people that use Facebook is just plain wrong and the headline in the Washington Post is misleading.
“What we’re actually doing: We developed a process to protect against people indiscriminately flagging news as fake and attempting to game the system.
“The reason we do this is to make sure that our fight against misinformation is as effective as possible.”
Online commentators are already comparing the system to China’s creepy “social credit” system.
The Chinese Government analyses social media habits and online shopping purchases and assigns citizens a score.
Jaywalking or skipping train fares can result in a lower score.
This score is then used to determine whether people can get a loan and even travel on public transport.
Some citizens with very low ratings become “blacklisted”, making it impossible to book a plane flight, rent or buy a property or stay in a luxury hotel.
The system is currently being piloted, but will become mandatory in China by 2020.
Facebook’s own rating system is the latest drive in its bid to tackle fake news, a growing problem for the social network.
The site, which has 2.23 billion users log on every single month, has become a hotbed for falsified news delivery.
In January, Samidh Chakrabarti, who heads up civic engagement at Facebook, said: “Even a handful of deliberately misleading stories can have dangerous consequences.
“Without transparency, it can be hard to hold politicians accountable for their own words.
“But we hope that by setting a new bar for transparency, we can tackle both of these challenges simultaneously.”