Facebook quietly rating users’ trustworthiness

■ The feature is used only by the social media platform’s misinformation team for measuring trustworthiness.

In the footsteps of Twitter, Facebook is giving rating to users but not publicly like Uber. In order to avoid people indiscriminately flagging news as fake and try to game the system, Facebook is rating users. It is not just fake news, but user often report things that they disagree.

In order to know which flaggers are trustworthy, Facebook came out with a rating system. The report of the users is crosschecked with fact news checkers. In India, the agency has tied up with fact news checking agencies. The feature is used only by the social media platform’s misinformation team for measuring trustworthiness. An international news agency in an interview with Facebook executive Tessa Lyons confirmed the rating about the platform's battle against "fake news."

The company claims to be doing this to ensure effectiveness in the fight against fake news. However, this is not the first company to do it. Uber allows drivers to rate their customers and the rating is visible in the user profile. Twitter has been using scoring to help recommend members to follow.

Mr Naresh Arora, Director of DesignBoxed who ran political social media campaigns said, “Considering Facebook and Twitter's user base in India, this move is sure to check the misuse of these platforms. Even though steps have been taken to ensure user authentication, but this space needs to be pursued more stringently and effectively, especially in the wake of recent developments in India with the spread of misinformation, which has even resulted in incidents of lynching.”

However, with Facebook being unregulated territory, there is no way to know user score. Additionally since the information is not out in open, the kind of data Facebook is using to process without informing them is questionable. Mr Mahender Yadav, facebook page admin, said, “It true that people report posts that are not objectionable, especially in our states followers of one actor tend to report that of other. It happened not just in Facebook, even on YouTube and Twitter. Bias make even not fake posts as one. But to assess each report and give a credibility score, Facebook will be using lot more information than merely a post in page. A persons views may change and it may be using previous history as well.”

Facebook needs to follow India’s Data Protection Law and EU’s GDPR Law.