Photo illustration (REUTERS/Dado Ruvic).
The fight against fake news is about to get a huge infusion of cash and support from the tech industry and academia.
Facebook and Mozilla have teamed up with Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, academic institutions, nonprofits, and other organizations to launch a $14 million consortium dubbed the News Integrity Initiative, aimed at "helping people make informed judgments about the news they read and share online."
"The initiative's mission is to advance news literacy, to increase trust in journalism around the world, and to better inform the public conversation," according to a Monday news release. It will fund "applied research and projects, and convene meetings with industry experts."
Founding funders also include the Craig Newmark Philanthropic Fund, the Ford Foundation, the Democracy Fund, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Tow Foundation, AppNexus, and Betaworks. The initiative will be run as an independent project by the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.
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The initiative comes after Facebook in January launched its "Journalism Project," aimed at establishing stronger ties with the media. Though Facebook has worked with members of the media in the past, the social network is working to ramp up that collaboration by involving news partners in its product development process from the start.
"As part of the Facebook Journalism Project, we want to give people the tools necessary to be discerning about the information they see online," Facebook's Head of News Partnerships Campbell Brown said in a statement. "Improving news literacy is a global concern, and this diverse group assembled by CUNY brings together experts from around the world to work toward building more informed communities."
This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.
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