Facebook’s fact-checking program relies on third-party fact-checking and news organizations to help weed out fake and misleading news on the platform. That limits the program from scaling up, since there are only so many organizations that do this work.
But what if Facebook could use regular people — people whose day job is not fact-checking — to fact-check articles instead? A new working paper from researchers at MIT suggests that it would be surprisingly effective, even if those people are only reading headlines. “Crowdsourcing is a promising approach for helping to identify misinformation at scale,” the paper’s authors write
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