Meta has announced a new partnership with the Press Trust of India (PTI) to combat the spread of viral misinformation across its platforms, which include Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Threads. Under this collaboration, PTI will serve as an independent fact-checker for Meta, focusing on identifying, evaluating, and categorizing misinformation. The partnership means that Meta now works with 12 different fact-checking agencies in India, providing coverage for content in 16 Indian languages. This development comes just ahead of the upcoming general elections in India.
In a press release issued on April 1, Meta stated, “Today, we are expanding our third-party fact-checking program in India to include Press Trust of India (PTI), a dedicated fact-checking unit within the newswire’s editorial department. This partnership will allow PTI to identify, review, and rate content as misinformation across Meta platforms.”
With the inclusion of PTI, Meta boasts a total of 12 fact-checking partners in India, including organizations such as AFP-Hub, The Quint, NewsChecker, India Today Fact Check, and Factly, among others. This initiative positions India as the country with the largest network of third-party fact-checking partners on Meta’s platforms globally. The company also emphasizes its commitment to regional language content, with coverage extending to 16 Indian languages alongside English, including Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam.
Meta’s fact-checking initiative began in 2016, aiming to tackle the issue of viral misinformation, particularly hoaxes devoid of factual basis. The third-party fact-checkers monitor such content and play a critical role in identifying, rating, and reviewing it. When content is rated as false, altered, or partially false by a fact-checker, Meta claims to reduce its distribution to lower visibility. Furthermore, the platform alerts users attempting to share the disputed content about the fact-checker’s evaluation and attaches a warning label linking to the partner’s article for additional context.
The company has stated that it exclusively partners with organizations certified by the non-partisan International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN). Currently, Meta collaborates with nearly 100 fact-checking partners worldwide, working to review and rate misinformation in over 60 languages.
