Facebook Slams Reports Of User ‘Trustworthiness’ Ratings

Facebook Slams Reports Of User ‘Trustworthiness’ Ratings
B&T Magazine
By B&T Magazine



Facebook has hit back at claims the social media giant is privately rating its users based on their level of trustworthiness.

The allegation was put forward overnight by The Washington Post in an article titled, ‘Facebook is rating the trustworthiness of its users on a scale from zero to 1’.

In the story, The Post accused Facebook of developing a “previously unreported rating system” which measures “the credibility of users to help identify malicious actors”.

Adding: “The score is one measurement among thousands of new behavioral clues that Facebook now takes into account as it seeks to understand risk.

“Facebook is also monitoring which users have a propensity to flag content published by others as problematic and which publishers are considered trustworthy by users.

“It is unclear what other criteria Facebook measures to determine a user’s score, whether all users have a score and in what ways the scores are used.”

Now, Facebook refuted the claim, calling The Post‘s headline “misleading”, adding it did not measure users’ reputations.

In a statement to B&T, a Facebook spokesperson said: “The idea that we have a centralised ‘reputation’ score for people that use Facebook is just plain wrong and the headline in The Washington Post is misleading.”

“What we’re actually doing: We developed a process to protect against people indiscriminately flagging news as fake and attempting to game the system.

“The reason we do this is to make sure that our fight against misinformation is as effective as possible.”




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Facebook Ratings trustworthiness users

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