Facebook to prioritize trustworthy news sources
Facebook
Inc will begin to prioritize trustworthy news outlets on its stream
of social media posts as it works to combat "sensationalism and misinformation, Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said on Friday.
The
company, which has more than 2 billion monthly users, said it will use
surveys to determine rankings on how trustworthy news outlets are. It
also said it would put an emphasis on local news sources.
The
move is likely to send shockwaves through the media landscape in nearly
every country, given the ubiquity of the world's largest social network
and how central it has become in some places to the distribution of
news.
Zuckerberg
outlined the shakeup in a post on Facebook, saying that starting next
week the News Feed, the company's centerpiece product, would prioritize high quality news over less trusted sources.
There's too much sensationalism, misinformation and polarization in the world today, Zuckerberg wrote.
Social
media enables people to spread information faster than ever before, and
if we don't specifically tackle these problems, then we end up
amplifying them, he wrote.
The change will affect not only links posted by news outlets but also news stories that individuals share, Facebook said.
At
the same time, Zuckerberg said he expects the amount of news overall on
Facebook to shrink by 20 percent: to about 4 percent of all content
from 5 percent currently.
Facebook
has had a stormy relationship with news organizations, especially those
with strong political leanings. In 2016, Republican U.S. lawmakers
expressed concern that Facebook was suppressing news stories of interest
to conservative readers.
Facebook
said that ranking by trustworthiness was not intended to directly
impact any specific groups of publishers based on their size or
ideological rankings.
Zuckerberg
said he settled on the idea of surveying Facebook users after rejecting
having the company itself rank news outlets trustworthiness.
We
decided that having the community determine which sources are broadly
trusted would be most objective, he wrote in his post.
Facebook
said it did not plan to release the survey results because they will
represent an incomplete picture of how a story's position in a person's
feed is determined.
Many
factors determine where a post appears in a Facebook user's News Feed:
from the subject of the post, to who wrote it, to who is commenting on
it.
News organizations immediately began considering how they and competitors would fare in the ranking.
This
sounds like extremely good news for news publishers that aren't hated
by one side or the other, Tom Gara, opinion editor at BuzzFeed News,
wrote on Twitter.
Last
week, Zuckerberg said the company would change the way it filters posts
and videos on News Feed to prioritize what friends and family share.
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