<p>As announced Wednesday, Facebook will be teaming up with two non-profits to fight the spread of fake news on its platform. ;</p>
<p>The National Democratic Institute and The International Republican Institute will help Facebook understand &ldquo;the risks that people may face and what we might be able to do to mitigate those&rdquo; around election time, explains Facebook executive Katie Harbath. ;</p>
<p>According to Facebook&rsquo;s VP of Communications, Facebook will not have the right to review or approve the non-profits&rsquo; findings prior to publication.</p>
<p>&ldquo;We think it&rsquo;s an important new model for partnerships between industry and academia,&rdquo; said a Facebook spokesperson. &ldquo;The last two years have taught us that the same Facebook tools that help politicians connect with their constituents&hellip;can also be misused to manipulate and deceive.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Facebook is also setting up a &ldquo;command center&rdquo; at its HQ in Menlo Park, California to monitor what&rsquo;s going on with upcoming elections in the US and Brazil.</p>
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<p>Facebook&#8217;s announcement comes after months of criticism in regards to its failure to police information on its platform during the 2016 elections.</p>
<p>According to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, blocking the spread of fake news is one of the site&rsquo;s &ldquo;top priorities&rdquo; for 2018. Facebook says it has ;deleted nearly 1.3 billion fake accounts since last October.</p>
<p>In August, the site said it had removed more than 600 &ldquo;inauthentic&rdquo; pages, accounts, and groups linked to Iran and Russia for spreading fake news. Twitter recently announced the suspension of nearly 300 accounts for &ldquo;coordinated manipulation&rdquo; and Google said it removed 58 accounts tied to Iran. ;</p>
<p>&ldquo;In 2016, our election security efforts prepared us for traditional cyberattacks like phishing, malware, and hacking,&rdquo; wrote Zuckerberg. &ldquo;We identified those and notified the government and those affected. What we didn&#8217;t expect were foreign actors launching coordinated information operations with networks of fake accounts spreading division and misinformation.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Facebook is better prepared for these kinds of attacks in 2018, he added. ;</p>
<p><strong>Author&#8217;s Note: ;</strong>This is definitely a step in the right direction for Facebook. ;</p>
<p>If you have reviewers on both sides of the spectrum judging political content &#8211; and you give both sides the power to veto that content &#8211; you could end up with a legitimate system for filtering out fake news. But for the system to really work, Facebook needs to utilize more than just two ;organizations ;and err on the side of not censoring content.</p>
<p><strong>Editor&#8217;s Note:</strong> This is finally the right approach, but I have ;little faith that Facebook will be able to get past its biases.</p>