Facebook plans to use Bloomsbury AI to fight fake news

2 min read

“Our investments in AI mean we can now remove more bad content quickly because we don’t have to wait until after it’s reported. It frees our reviewers to work on cases where human expertise is needed to understand the context or nuance of a situation. In Q1, for example, almost 90% of graphic violence content that we removed or added a warning label to was identified using AI.

This shift from reactive to proactive detection is a big change — and it will make Facebook safer for everyone.”

Mark Zuckerberg, in Facebook’s earnings, call on Wednesday this week

To understand the significance of the above statement, we must first look at the past.

Last year, Social media giant Facebook suffered from multiple lawsuits across the UK, Germany, and US for defamation due to fake news articles and for spreading misleading information. To make amends, Facebook came up with fake news identification tools, however, failed to completely tame the effects of bogus news. In fact, the company’s revenue took a bad hit in advertising revenue along with its social reputation nosediving.

Early this month, Facebook confirmed the acquisition of Bloomsbury AI, a London-based artificial intelligence start-up with over 60 patents acquired to date. Bloomsbury AI focuses on natural language processing – developing machine reading methods that can understand written text across a broad range of domains.

The Artificial Intelligence team at Facebook would be on-boarding the complete team of Bloomsbury AI and will build highly robust methods to kill the plague of fake news throughout the Facebook platform. The rich expertise carried over by the Bloomsbury AI team will strengthen Facebook’s endeavor in natural language processing research and gauge deeper understanding of natural language and its applications. It appears that the amalgamation will help Facebook to develop advanced machine reading, reasoning and question answering methods which will boost the Facebook’s NLP engine to understand the legitimacy of questions across broad range of topics and make intellect choices thereby defeating the challenges of fake news and Autobots. No doubt, Facebook is going to leverage the Bloomsbury’s Cape service to answer a majority of the questions on unstructured text. The duo would play a significant role in parsing the content majorly to tackle fake photos and videos too.

In addition, it has been said that the new team members would provide an active contribution to the ongoing artificial intelligence projects such as AI hardware chips, AI technology mimicking humans and many more.