As the French Presidential election approaches, French news agency AFP – alongside 16 others including French daily Le Monde and BuzzFeed News – has teamed up with Google and Facebook to try and combat the growing challenge of fake news.
The publisher is hoping to prevent misinformation from influencing the upcoming election, following concerns that fake news impacted the way people voted in the US.
“As with journalists’ safety, media do not need to compete when it comes to fighting disinformation and manipulation,” said Michèle Léridon, AFP’s news director.
“Between post-truth and conspiracies, the core values of our profession are under attack and we have to fight back together.”
AFP is joining initiatives by the First Draft Network which this week launched the CrossCheck project with Facebook and Google News Lab.
Crosscheck is a collaborative tool that brings together the biggest social networks and international agencies in an effort to stop the spread of disinformation and make sure that the public has access to verified information.
Germany and the US are already on board.
Grégoire Lemarchand, assistant to the editor-in-chief of AFP, said: “Verifying facts has always been key to our work at AFP and has an important position in the CrossCheck project, where it approves the work produced by the participating teams.”
The news comes a week after UK MPs launched an inquiry into false stories, and in the same week a new Channel 4 study reveals that just 4% of Brits can distinguish between real and fake news.
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