Facebook, Mozilla, Ford Foundation and Craig (from Craighlist) along with 22 more organizations have launched a fund for News Integrity Initiative, which has given itself an aim of promoting news literacy and increasing people's trust in journalism. In short, the nonprofit organisation will fight against fake news on the internet.
The News Integrity Initiative will be based at City University of New York (CUNY) and it will proceed as an independent project by the Graduate School of Journalism of CUNY.
Dan Gillmor, author and professor at Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University stated that "Creation of a funders consortium emerged as a major theme from the Facebook-ASU news literacy working group meeting just a month ago."
How the organization plans to work on the new literacy has not been cleared yet, but the authority has announced that there will be some "Early participants who will contribute to conversations, host events around the world, and bring projects and research for potential funding to the Initiative's attention".
As per The Register, the early members include PR firms Edelman and Weber Shandwick, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Polis, the journalism think-tank, from the London School of Economics, the International Center for Journalists and Australia's Walkley Foundation.
Expansion of false news and misleading reports have gained a lot of attention since the 2016 US presidential election and now it is a burning problem all over the internet. Companies like Facebook and Google have pledged to work on the matter to stop this practice.
"The initiative will address the problems of misinformation, disinformation and the opportunities the internet provides to inform the public conversation in new ways," stated Campbell Brown Facebook's Head of News Partnerships.
