FACEBOOK IS RATING USERS ON WHETHER THEY ARE TRUSTWORTHY

Facebook will be rating users on whether they are trustworthy or not, and will be scored on a scale from one to zero.

After the social media giant announced an upcoming dating app to rival Tinder, Facebook plans to do some more creeping of its own, now scoring its users' trustworthiness on a scale from zero to one.

The newly announced rating process, according to Facebook's product manager, Tessa Lyons, has been tested in the past year in an attempt to challenge fake news and misinformation according to the Washington Post.

It is still unclear what criteria Facebook will use to determine its users' rating, Lynos clarified that a user's trustworthiness score is not considered to be one's absolute credibility index – instead, the score will be one among many behavioural factors that are used by the app to understand which profiles are more likely to flag other users' content, or which accounts are considered reliable by others. The social network still heavily relies on users helping them weed out fake news.

Facebook, that introduced the 'report' option in 2015 (that enabled accounts to flag up content deemed violent, pornographic, hate speech or fake news), found it was "not uncommon for people to tell us something is false simply because they disagree with the premise of a story or they’re intentionally trying to target a particular publisher," Lyons said in an interview.

Since then, the social platform with over two billion active users has announced new measures against fake stories. Introducing a new fact-checking system involving third-party verification experts, Facebook has enlisted over 24 fact-checking organisations from 14 countries.

As stupid as this trustworthiness rating system might end up to be or even sound, it could actually hinder abuse and harassment on the platform.