Meta expands Third-Party Fact Checking Program in India with PTI

Delhi: Meta has expanded its third-party fact-checking program in India to include Press Trust of India  (PTI), a fact-checking unit within the newswire’s editorial department. The partnership will enable PTI to identify, review and rate content as misinformation across Meta platforms. 

To fight the spread of misinformation and provide people with more reliable information, Meta partners with independent third-party fact-checkers that are certified through the non-partisan International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) who identify, review and rate viral misinformation across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. 

With this partnership with PTI, Meta now clocks 12 fact-checking partners in India, making it the country with the most third-party fact-checking partners globally across Meta. Their Indian language coverage stands at 16 through the existing fact-checking partners include Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Urdu, Punjabi, Assamese, Manipuri/ Meitei, Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil, Kashmiri, Bhojpuri, Oriya and Nepali, besides English. 

Each time a fact-checker rates a piece of content as false, altered or partly false, Meta reduces its distribution so that fewer people see it. They notify people who try to share the content – or who previously shared it – that the information was rated by a fact-checker, and they add a warning label that links to the fact-checker’s article with more information about the claim.