Facebook has announced a partnership with Mumbai-based fact-checking website BOOM, to help the social network tackle the spread of fake news on its platform. The "third party fact-checking program" will start with a pilot in Karnataka ahead of the state elections next month. The announcement of the pilot program was made in a company blog post, which also attempts to explain how the fact-checking process on Facebook presently works. This is not the first time Facebook has partnered with third-party fact checkers – it has similar deals with fact-checking groups in the US, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Indonesia, and the Philippines. But is the platform's first such initiative in India, the company's largest market with over 270 million users (data: Statista). Like other Facebook fact-checking partners, BOOM is certified through the International Fact-Checking Network, a non-partisan international fact-checking network at Poynter. It will be able to review the English-language stories shared on Facebook and rate their accuracy. In the blog post, Facebook says that once a story is rated as false, the platform has been able to reduce its distribution by 80% which helps stop false stories from spreading. The company then elaborates how the process of fact-checking works on the social network. It goes something as follows, When a fact-checker rates a story as false, it will be shown lower in News Feed, significantly reducing its distribution. This intends to stop the hoax from spreading and reduces the number of people who see it. Pages and domains that repeatedly…
