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posted by martyb on Monday January 22 2018, @06:26AM   Printer-friendly
from the quis-custodiet-ipsos-custodes dept.

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.

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.

At the same time, Zuckerberg said the amount of news overall on Facebook would shrink to roughly 4 percent of the content on the News Feed from 5 percent currently.

Source: Reuters

The new Facebook echochamber where users decide what is trustworthy

https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/01/trusted-sources/

Facebook is going to let its user rate what is a trustworthy news source. Could be great (One would think they assume the pure number of people will try and do a good and honest job), or it will undoubtedly enforce the echo chamber / bubble mentality (where people think that their news source are all trustworthy and the opposing sources are all fake news) or it will end hilariously (like when Microsoft let the public train its AI chatbot Tay and it went all Hitler on them in record time).


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by bobthecimmerian on Monday January 22 2018, @01:41PM

    by bobthecimmerian (6834) on Monday January 22 2018, @01:41PM (#626059)

    Facebook's financial interest is served by keeping people on the site as much as possible. So that fundamentally puts Facebook into conflict with honest reporting - if they show a liberal rational, objectively presented evidence that supports a conservative position the person is liable to be bored and take their attention elsewhere. Showing liberal-friendly news they want to comment on and share or inflammatory conservative rhetoric they want to attack and react upon will keep them at the site. And of course the same is true in reverse.

    Once I became conscious of how much they were manipulating me, and the hours and hours I spent every damn day in 2016 and early 2017 on the site, I stopped cold. I deleted everything on my Facebook account except one post. It links to an article on the research and effort social media sites put into sucking in users as long as possible for the purpose of maximum ad revenue.

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