Facebook will now fact check photos, videos as it fights misinformation – CNET

In the quest to weed out misinformation on social media, Facebook is expanding its fact checking efforts to photos and videos in 17 countries, the company said via blogpost Thursday. 

In the post, product manager Antonia Woodford said Facebook’s built a machine learning model that flags possibly false content for fact-checkers to look at. 

“Many of our third-party fact-checking partners have expertise evaluating photos and videos and are trained in visual verification techniques, such as reverse image searching and analyzing image metadata, like when and where the photo or video was taken,” Woodford said.

This comes as social media platforms like Facebook have had to grapple with how their networks can be used to spread misinformation and even influence elections. Last week, COO Sheryl Sandberg went before Congress along with Twitter CEO Jack Doresy to answer questions from lawmakers. 

In a post out Wednesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company’s learned a lot since Russian meddling in  the 2016 election and that they’ve “developed sophisticated systems that combine technology and people to prevent election interference on our services.”