For quite some time there has been a bloodless war going on, as the truth has been battling for its life, besieged by fake news. In the wake of the US election, Facebook came under fire for unwittingly promulgating falsehoods, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg finding himself answering to the US Congress for his company’s role in the debacle earlier this year.

Now, the company has made its latest move to deal with this scourge, by hiring startup Bloomsbury AI’s team. The latter, which is based in the UK, apparently managed to impress by developing technology that can understand text, and even offer deep insight, to the extent that it can answer questions about it.

According to TechCrunch, the AI team will be responsible for developing tools that can leverage artificial intelligence to weed out undesirable content, and distinguish fake news from the truth. How exactly it will accomplish that is unclear at this point, but it seems like the team have some experience in meeting the challenge.

Indeed, the CTO for Bloomsbury AI, Sebastian Riedel, is credited with previously founding Factmata, which used machine learning to deal with misleading content online.

For us though, a good start would be to call fake news what it is, and for what it has been referred to by oppressive regimes throughout history – propaganda.