Facebook adds African languages to curb fake news

Facebook has announced that more African languages will be used in its effort to curb fake news. The social media giant said the new language support was part of its third-party fact-checking programme in partnership with Africa Check, an independent fact-checking organisation. They said the number of languages covered by the fact-checking initiative would expand by 10. It will include SA's Afrikaans; Swahili, widely spoken in Kenya; Nigeria's Yoruba; and Wolof, which is native to Senegal. Africa Check director Noko Makgato said the move would help ensure that misinformation in languages other than English and French could be identified and tackled. His team will review and rate video, text and photo content that have been flagged as possibly containing fake news. ‘The system allows us to rate content based on a range of options from “true” to “mixture” of true and false, “satire”, “opinion” and “false”,' he told CNN.