Meta Expands Third-Party Fact Checking Program in India with Press Trust of India

Bengaluru, April 2, 2024: Today, we are expanding our third-party fact-checking program in India to include Press Trust of India (PTI), a dedicated 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. Globally, we’ve also built the largest independent fact-checking network of any platform, with nearly 100 partners around the world to review and rate viral misinformation in more than 60 languages.

With this partnership with PTI, we now have 12 fact-checking partners in India, making it the country with the most third-party fact-checking partners globally across Meta. Our Indian language coverage stands at 16 through our existing fact-checking partners including 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, we reduce its distribution so that fewer people see it. We notify people who try to share the content – or who previously shared it – that the information was rated by a fact-checker, and we add a warning label that links to the fact-checker article with more information about the claim.