The Mozilla Foundation has launched yet another project aimed at tackling online misinformation, or fake news. The foundation is reportedly looking for partners and is waiting for ideas from users of its services on how to do it better.
It's called the Mozilla Information Trust Initiative (MITI), and it's led by Katharina Borchert. In a blog post, she briefly stated that the spread of so-called "fake news" is not beneficial to the internet:
“The impact of misinformation on our society is one of the most divisive, and important, issues of our time. Misinformation drains transparency and conflict, erodes participation and trust, and the public good of the web is lost.”
“In short: It makes the Internet less healthy. As a result, the Internet’s ability to power democratic society has been lost.”.
For now, however, the Mozilla Foundation has no specific plan and will conduct disinformation investigations later in the year based on user browsing data collected during the 2016 US presidential election.
The foundation will also create an “e-literacy curriculum,” partner with media organizations, and use its Pocket, Focus, and Coral products in its fight against fake news.
Urging Mozilla to enter the fight, Borchert said that the misinformation was against “almost every tenet” in the Mozilla Manifesto
“Mozilla has a long history of putting its community and principles first and dedicating resources to pressing issues – the Firefox browser is just one example,” he said. “Mozilla is committed to building more tolerance than hate and building the technology that can protect people and the web.”
In March, Tim Berners-Lee called on all major internet companies to combat “fake news” on their respective platforms.
Last week, the Mozilla Foundation released Send, a free tool for sharing files that are deleted from the server once a single download is complete.
Sending supports files up to 1GB in size which are deleted after the first download is complete or after 24 hours.
On Wednesday, the Mozilla Foundation released the new Firefox 55, the first desktop browser to support WebVR, but it is currently only supported on Windows.
