Should Buy Snopes to Get Serious About Fact-Checking? - The Atlantic

This domain is poised to become a historic test of the potential of machine learning

"It would still be quite a leap to move from a focus on emotional and physical safety to refereeing the facts in a debate—and, on top of that, it would be really hard to do. The sheer volume of links posted to Facebook every day would make it incredibly difficult for even a large team of human fact-checkers to take on. Yet the current, algorithmic system doesn’t seem to be doing its job, either, judging by the volume of posts that have slipped through the cracks.

Perhaps the algorithms that currently find disputed posts could flag them for human review by a Snopes-like fact-checking team—heck, it could even buy Snopes. Once they’d researched the facts in the story and determined its accuracy, they could overlay a badge like the ones that already populate the Snopes site—an X in a red circle for “false”; a check mark in a green circle for “true”—on one corner of the link preview in the post."

Should Buy Snopes to Get Serious About Fact-Checking? - The Atlantic