Facebook has announced that it wants its users to see high-quality news in their feed as it makes changes to make the site more personal to you. It said while you will see less news content overall on the website, the content that it does show should be of “high quality”. The content users do see will be more localised too.
In a Facebook post, Mark Zuckerberg said:
“Today I’m sharing our second major update this year: to make sure the news you see, while less overall, is high quality. I’ve asked our product teams to make sure we prioritize news that is trustworthy, informative, and local. And we’re starting next week with trusted sources.
There’s too much sensationalism, misinformation and polarization in the world today. 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. That’s why it’s important that News Feed promotes high quality news that helps build a sense of common ground.”
Instead of asking outside experts to judge which content is trustworthy, Facebook is going to reach out to its users through “ongoing quality surveys”. It’ll ask users whether they’re familiar with the news source and, if so, whether they trust the source. With this data, Facebook says that the reliable sources will be those which are considered trustworthy even by those who don’t actively follow that source’s content.
Facebook says the overall effect of this change is that the balance of news you see from sources will be shifted to the content the community deems trustworthy. It’ll be interesting to see whether this change disadvantages websites which are newer and are therefore less well known to the wider public, despite whether they have legitimate content or not.
Source: Facebook Newsroom
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