To fight the spread of fake news, Facebook on Thursday said it was trying a series of tests to limit the false articles, including working with several news organizations like The Associated Press, PolitiFact and Snopes. Those groups have formed a coalition to fact-check some of the items flagged as fake news across the social network.

The Times interviewed James Goldston, the president of ABC News, which is one of the participants in Facebook’s fact-checking partnership, to learn more about the effort.

How did the partnership with Facebook come about?

James Goldston: We’ve been very aware of the talks about fake news through this whole election cycle. I think we regard this as a core tenet of our public service, which is to give the American people the real facts and information they can use to help make their decisions.

When we heard Facebook was looking at ways to deal with the fake news issue, we were keen to get involved. And we have pretty deep links with our partners at Facebook. We’ve done virtual reality initiatives with Facebook; we were the streaming source for the election. We have very good contacts there, and were eager to get on board.