Facebook is launching a campaign to help users spot fake news. Steve Hatch - the social network's vice president for Northern Europe - has opened up about the company's media literacy campaign with fact-checkers FullFact, and suggested the firm is "listening and adapting". The effort comes amid an advertising boycott with more than 150 companies - including the likes of Starbucks and Coca-Cola - putting pressure on Facebook to tackle hate speech and misinformation. The company's new campaign will direct people to StampOutFalseNews.com, which asks key questions including where content is from, what is missing and how users felt reading it. Speaking to BBC, Hatch insisted "financial considerations" aren't behind the campaign. He added: "If people were sharing information that could cause real-world harm, we will take that down. We've done that in hundreds of thousands of cases." However, Chloe Colliver - head of the digital research unit at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue - described Facebook's move as "too little, too late". She said: "We've seen Facebook try to take reactive and often quite small steps to stem the tide of disinformation on the platform. "But they haven't been able to proactively produce policies that help prevent users from seeing disinformation, false identities, false accounts, and false popularity on their platforms."
