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Social media platforms, including Facebook, Google, Twitter and ByteDance, are in talks to form an industry-wide alliance to tackle fake news on their platforms in India, the Economic Times reported on Tuesday.
The proposed alliance, to be named as the Information Trust Alliance (ITA), is being led by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), the report said.
ITA will bring together social media platforms, digital publishers, content creators, fact-checkers, civil society and academics to spread awareness about fake news and harmful misinformation among netizens through collaborative efforts. The companies are also discussing a possible ‘Code of Practice’ to curb misinformation as per the report.
The platforms have refused to comment on the matter.
New guidelines underway
The government is already formulating rules to regulate social media platforms. New guidelines for these platforms will be introduced later this month as per a Bloomberg report.
The platforms have introduced individual guidelines to curb misinformation overall.
Facebook, in January, released its new initiative to counter fake news on its platform in a run-up to US elections. The platform had highlighted its policies to counter deepfake videos, i.e., doctored videos, edited using AI, to make them seem real. The social media platform’s strategy is to collaborate with over 50 experts from different backgrounds, including technical, policy, media, legal, civic and academia for detecting fake news and create policy to navigate the same.
Micro-blogging platform Twitter too recently updated its Twitter Rules, the guidelines for Twitter users to counter fake information. Twitter will begin to label, and in some cases remove, doctored or manipulated photo, audio and video, that are designed to mislead people as per the update.
Fake news
The social media platforms had further announced a crack-down on misinformation in light of the coronavirus outbreak which has claimed over 1,700 lives in China alone.
Social media platforms had been key in spreading misinformation and creating panic among citizens related to the outbreak according to media reports.
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