Democrat billionaire George Soros is among investors who will bankroll Facebook's new fake news fact checking feature

Billionaire Clinton donor George Soros is among a line-up of wealthy liberal figures who will fund Facebook's fake news fact checker.

The 86-year-old Hungarian financier's Open Society Foundation is listed among organizations which are backing The International Fact Checking Network, the body tasked with flagging bogus news stories to social media users, on its website.

Soros, a staunch Democrat who tried to block George W. Bush's campaign in 2004, has given $25million to Clinton and causes dear to her.

Other donors involved in the new fact checking feature include eBay founder Pierre Omidyar who has committed more than $30million to the Clintons and their charities.

Google, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the National Endowment for Democracy are also funding the pilot.

The line-up feeds criticism from right-wing commentators that the new fact checking feature will be biased towards left-wing causes and could interfere with the social media feeds of millions of voters.

The feature was announced by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday night.

It will flag any stories which have been 'disputed by a 3rd party' before users attempt to share them and prohibit the promotion of any fake stories.

The third parties include but are not limited to ABC News, Politico, Snopes and The Washington Post.

They are among signatories to the IFCN's code of principles. The Poynter Institute said it would review its sign-up processes in light of Facebook's announcement and would not be accepting any new members for the foreseeable future.

eBay founder Pierre Omidyar (left) is also involved in the pilot scheme that was announced by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (right) on Thursday

Soros's support was considered so crucial by Clinton campaign aides during the presidential race they discussed how to 'keep him happy' in leaked emails.

In one, senior aide Huma Abedin advised campaign manager Robby Mook to send Clinton to a Soros event 'for political reasons'.

When her crushing defeat was made plain on November 9, Soros regrouped with other Democrat mega-donors to discuss how they could 'take back power' from the Republicans.

At a meeting arranged by the Democracy Alliance, another organization spearheaded by the billionaire, insiders plotted how to correct the course of action and dissect their mistakes in trying to get Hillary elected.

' You don’t lose an election you were supposed to win, with so much at stake, without making some big mistakes, in assumptions, strategy and tactics,' Gara LaMarche, president of the Democracy Alliance, admitted in his opening statement.

His role has prompted rife concern among right-wing news organizations.

Breitbart, whose owners are among Trump's largest donors, heralded news of Soros's involvement as proof of bias in the Facebook feature.

Infowars, another staunchly Republican site, was among the first to condemn the added feature and question the trustworthiness of the 'third party' checkers.

' One of Facebook's 'fact checkers' is the Washington Post, who had to admit to putting out an inaccurate 'fake news' list just a week ago,' said Infowars' Paul Watson on Twitter.

'The 'fact checkers' that will bury 'fake news' on Facebook is just a bunch of mainstream news outlets. This is about silencing competition,' he added

Investigative conservative group, Veritas Action, added: 'Seriously @facebook? Using biased sources re @factcheckdotorg @snopes @PolitiFact as sources to determine #FakeNews?'

Conservative and right wing news outlets were among the loudest voices, accusing Facebook of choosing left-wing partisan organisations after the social media giant announced that the Poynter Institute's International Fact-Checking Network would lead the fact-checkers

Clinton has blamed Russia for her campaign defeat. Some of the fake news stories which may have harmed her chances came from Russian sources

Meanwhile the FrontPage said the move should make conservatives re-consider using Facebook at all.

WHO ARE THE FACT CHECKERS? The third party fact checkers are members of the International Fact Checking Network which was founded in September 2015 amid a surge of fake news stories. The network's members are those which signed up to it before Facebook announced its pilot scheme with the Poynter Institute. Some but not all of those listed below will be tasked with checking any stories flagged by Facebook users. The current list, which has now been closed to new signatories, is below: ABC News (USA) Africa Check (South Africa, Senegal and Kenya) Agência Lupa (Brazil) Agência Pública - Truco (Aos Fatos (Brazil) AP (USA) Added Dec. 15th Balkan Investigative Reporting Network Kosovo (Kosovo) Climate Feedback (USA) Added Dec. 5th Colombiacheck (Colombia) Added Nov. 11th Chequeado (Argentina) Demagog CZ (Czech Republic) Demagog PL (Poland) Doğruluk Payı (Turkey) El Deber Data (Bolivia) El Mercurio El Poligrafo (Chile) El Objetivo La Sexta (Spain) Factcheck.org (USA) FactCheck Georgia (Georgia) FactCheck Northern Ireland (UK) FactCheck-Ukraine (Ukraine) FactsCan (Canada) Faktabaari (Finland) Full Fact (UK) GKillCity.com (Ecuador) Internews Kosova (Kosovo) Internews Kosova Istinomer (Serbia) Melu Detektors (Latvia) Added Sept. 26th Metamorphosis Foundation (Macedonia) Observador (Portugal) Ojo Publico (Peru) Pagella Politica (Italy) Pesa Check (Kenya) PolitiFact (USA) Snopes (USA) South Asia Check (Nepal) TheJournal.ie (Ireland) UY Check (Uruguay) Valheenpaljastaja (Finland) VERA Files Fact Check (Philippines) Added Sept. 19th VoxUkraine (Ukraine) The Washington Post Fact Checker (USA) Zašto ne Istinomjer (Bosnia & Herzegovina) Advertisement

'In essence, Facebook is giving the partisan left free space on conservative news links. It's also allowing them to undermine a conservative link while promoting their own agenda. '

'It's not quite censorship, but the partnership with left-wing partisan "checkers" helps move it to the next step of barring sites outright. For the moment, Facebook has decided that you shouldn't just be able to share links to what you're interested in without the left getting a say.

'This is yet another reason for conservatives to rethink being on Facebook,' the news outlet stated.

The Weekly Standard questioned the authority of those signed up to the network so self-police.

It singled out Politifact, recalling several occasions in which the outlet admitted it had peddled falsities.

Fake news peddlers themselves however welcomed the announcement.

'This is the right approach,' Marco Chacon, the founder of fake news site RealTrueNews.org, told The Daily Beast.

He said the move gave more responsibility to social media users who like to share articles, even if they believe they may be fake, as part of 'tribe signaling'.

Under Mark Zuckerberg's new plans, these organizations will get to determine what news stories being shared on Facebook are real, and which should be flagged as fake.

Facebook will then prohibit paid promotion of stories marked as disputed.

Users will have the option to 'learn why this is disputed' for further explanation as to why Facebook has flagged it as fake.

'We'll use the reports from our community, along with other signals, to send stories to these organizations,' Facebook VP Adam Mosseri wrote in a statement.

'If the fact checking organizations identify a story as fake, it will get flagged as disputed and there will be a link to the corresponding article explaining why.'

Facebook will not go as far as to ban users from posting any 'fake' news, but each new posting will carry the warning that the story's authenticity has been disputed.

For a story to be passed to the fact-checkers, readers must first flag it as potentially fake. Once enough users report it, it goes to the Poynter Institute's International Fact-Checking Network.

Fake news stories on Facebook have touched on a broad range of subjects, from unproven cancer cures to celebrity hoaxes and backyard Bigfoot sightings.

But fake political stories have drawn attention because of the possibility that they influenced public perceptions and could have swayed the U.S. presidential election.

There have been other dangerous real-world consequences.

A fake story about a child sex ring at a Washington, D.C., pizza joint prompted a man to fire an assault rifle inside the restaurant, Comet Ping Pong.

'We do believe that we have an obligation to combat the spread of fake news,' said John Hegeman, vice president of product management on news feed.

Sources of misinformation range from click-bait produced by 'content farms', to partisan sites from both parties, to accusations that Russia has been spreading 'fake news' on social media to swing the election for Trump after analysts 'traced anti-Clinton stories back to Moscow-linked Twitter trolls'.

Among 'fake' stories peddled by accounts with links to Moscow was one focused on Clinton's apparent ill health after she fell ill at a 9/11 memorial event in September.

In the future, Facebook messages that are disputed will display these messages

Mark Zuckerberg posted that he was improving Facebook in the wake of the fake news scandal

Speculation grew over her condition after she appeared to faint on camera while getting in to her car. A string of stories ensued after the Democratic candidate appeared at other events fighting a lingering cough.

It was later revealed she was battling pneumonia. Some outlets, however, picked up on claims she was suffering Parkinson's disease or Syphilis.

The unfounded reports were then shared thousands of times on Twitter, said the experts.

By partnering with respected outside organizations and flagging, rather than removing, fake stories, Facebook is sidestepping some of the biggest concerns experts had raised about it exercising its considerable power in this area.

MARK ZUCKERBERG'S STATEMENT IN FULL A few weeks ago, I outlined some projects we're working on to build a more informed community and fight misinformation. Today, I want to share an update on work we're starting to roll out. We have a responsibility to make sure Facebook has the greatest positive impact on the world. This update is just one of many steps forward, and there will be more work beyond this. Facebook is a new kind of platform different from anything before it. I think of Facebook as a technology company, but I recognize we have a greater responsibility than just building technology that information flows through. While we don't write the news stories you read and share, we also recognize we're more than just a distributor of news. We're a new kind of platform for public discourse -- and that means we have a new kind of responsibility to enable people to have the most meaningful conversations, and to build a space where people can be informed. With any changes we make, we must fight to give all people a voice and resist the path of becoming arbiters of truth ourselves. I believe we can build a more informed community and uphold these principles. Here's what we're doing: Today we're making it easier to report hoaxes, and if many people report a story, then we'll send it to third-party fact checking organizations. If the fact checkers agree a story is a hoax, you'll see a flag on the story saying it has been disputed, and that story may be less likely to show up in News Feed. You'll still be able to read and share the story, but you'll now have more information about whether fact checkers believe it's accurate. No one will be able to make a disputed story into an ad or promote it on our platform. We've also found that if people who read an article are significantly less likely to share it than people who just read the headline, that may be a sign it's misleading. We're going to start incorporating this signal into News Feed ranking. These steps will help make spreading misinformation less profitable for spammers who make money by getting more people to visit their sites. And we're also going to crack down on spammers who masquerade as well-known news organizations. This is just one of many steps we'll make to keep improving the quality of our service. Thanks to everyone for your feedback on this, and check back here for more updates to come. Advertisement

For instance, some worried that Facebook might act as a censor — and not a skillful one, either, being an engineer-led company with little experience making complex media ethics decisions.

'They definitely don't have the expertise,' said Robyn Caplan, researcher at Data & Society, a nonprofit research institute funded in part by Microsoft and the National Science Foundation. In an interview before Facebook's announcement, she urged the company to 'engage media professionals and organizations that are working on these issues.'

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg insists that fake news constitutes less than one percent of what's on Facebook , but critics say that's wildly misleading.

For a site with nearly 2 billion users tapping out posts by the millisecond, even one percent is a huge number, especially since the total includes everything that's posted on Facebook — photos, videos and daily updates in addition to news articles.

In a study released Thursday, the Pew Research Center found that nearly a quarter of Americans say they have shared a made-up news story, either knowingly or unknowingly.

Forty-five percent said that the government, politicians and elected officials bear responsibility for preventing made-up stories from gaining attention. Forty-two percent put this responsibility on social networking sites and search engines, and a similar percentage on the public itself.

Fake news stories can be quicker to go viral than news stories from traditional sources. That's because they were created for sharing — they are clickable, often inflammatory and pander to emotional responses.

Mike Caufield, director of blended and networked learning at Washington State University Vancouver, tracked whether real or fake news is more likely to be shared on Facebook.

He compared a made-up story from a fake outlet with articles in local newspapers. The fake story, headlined 'FBI Agent Suspected In Hillary Leaks Found Dead In Apparent Murder-Suicide' from the nonexistent Denver Guardian, was shared 1,000 times more than material from the real newspapers.

'To put this in perspective, if you combined the top stories from the Boston Globe, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and LA Times, they still had only 5% the viewership of an article from a fake news,' he wrote in a blog post .

Facebook is emphasizing that it's only going after the most egregious fake news creators and sites, the 'the clear hoaxes spread by spammers for their own gain,' wrote Adam Mosseri , vice president of product for Facebook's news feed, in a blog post Thursday.

The news Facebook will be relying on independent fact checkers comes just days after the social media site revealed it has been misleading its advertisers.

Facebook wrote on Friday that it had been miscalculating more of its viewership metrics for advertisers.

One miscalculation is a discrepancy between the number of likes and shares Facebook shows for web links through its Graph API for advertisers and through its mobile search field.

Facebook has also been miscalculating the number of likes and reaction emojis that page owners see for their live videos.