Meta expands its third-party fact checking programme in India with PTI tie-up

India is the largest market for Meta's family of apps with a combined user base of over a billion monthly users.

Facebook parent Meta on April 1 announced a partnership with news agency Press Trust of India (PTI) as the social networking giant looks to expand its third-party fact checking programme in India ahead of the forthcoming Lok Sabha elections.

Through this partnership, PTI's fact-checking unit will identify, review and rate content as misinformation across Meta's platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

With this partnership, Meta said that it now has 12 fact-checking partners in India, making it the country with the most third-party fact-checking partners across the world.

Through its partners, Meta now covers 16 Indian languages including Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Urdu, Punjabi, Assamese, Manipuri/ Meitei, Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil, Kashmiri, Bhojpuri, Oriya and Nepali, apart from English.

India is the largest market for Meta's family of apps with a combined user base of over a billion monthly users.

The company said it partners with independent third-party fact-checkers that are certified through International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) in a bid to fight the spread of misinformation and provide people with more reliable information on its platforms. These fact-checkers identify, review and rate viral misinformation across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

Read: Meta to start labeling AI-generated images from companies like OpenAI, Google

Since 2016, Meta's fact-checking programme has expanded to include nearly 100 partners who review and rate viral misinformation in more than 60 languages, the company said in a statement.

Among its India partners include Boom, AFP, Factly, Fact Crescendo, NewsChecker, NewsMeter, Newsmobile Fact Checker, The Healthy Indian Project, The Quint, India Today Fact Check and Vishvas.News.

Meta said that each time a fact-checker rates a piece of content as false, altered or partly false, the company reduces its distribution so that fewer people see it on their platforms.

The social networking firm also notifies people who try to share the content or who previously shared it that the information was rated by a fact-checker apart from adding a warning label that links to the fact-checker’s article with more information about the claim.

"The focus of the program is to address viral misinformation – particularly clear hoaxes that have no basis in fact. Fact-checking partners prioritize provably false claims that are timely, trending and consequential" Meta said in a statement.

Last month, Meta said it will activate a country-specific Elections Operations Center in the run-up to the Lok Sabha elections.

This centre will bring together experts from the company's intelligence, data science, engineering, research, operations, content policy and legal teams to "identify potential threats and put specific mitigations in place across its apps and technologies in real time"

Read: Google's Gemini to curb responses to some poll-related queries ahead of Lok Sabha elections

Meta said it is also building tools to label AI -generated images from Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Adobe, Midjourney, and Shutterstock that users post to Facebook, Instagram and Threads.

The company already labels photorealistic images created using Meta AI by putting visible markers that users can see on the images, along with invisible watermarks and metadata embedded within image files.

Starting this year, Meta also requires advertisers across the world to disclose when they use AI or digital methods to create or alter a political or social issue ad in certain cases. This includes if the ad contains a photorealistic image or video, or realistic sounding audio, that was digitally created or altered to depict a real person as saying or doing something they did not say or do.

This policy also applies if an ad depicts a realistic-looking person that does not exist or a realistic-looking event that did not happen, alters footage of a real event, or depicts a realistic event that allegedly occurred, but is not a true image, video, or audio recording of the event.