Facebook is looking to crack down on the false stories that keep popping up in your news feed and it has started tweaking its algorithm to that effect.
Last night in a blog post the company’s engineers described some of the changes coming to the social network designed to make users’ lives a tiny bit better – and the service more valuable in the process of course.
Spammy posts and bogus news stories that are reported as such by users will now get less “air time” on other people’s news feed. Now this doesn’t actually mean they’ll go away completely, but Facebook will display a warning next to these items saying they’ve been reported as fake by other users.
Of course the system will need to prove itself reliable if it is to survive the abuse that it’s likely to encounter. How many people will report a news story as fake or spammy just because they don’t agree with it? Luckily the engineers designing it have already considered these possibilities and are working to make the system as robust as they can.
This move comes just a couple of months after the social network announced it wanted to restrict the number of promotional posts that its users see in their timelines. Both of these moves, while obviously appreciated by users, will also ensure that Facebook’s value goes up.
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