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
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).
(Score: 1) by anubi on Tuesday January 23 2018, @08:47AM
Thanks! I would love to use this as another citation of the observation.
Over my lifetime, I have seen way too much artfully presented technoshit sold for top dollar to the investor class, and try as I might, I would simply be ignored, classified by the presenter as one who is too technically obsolete to see the possibilities... All I could do was watch the inevitable unfold, and find myself in the unpaid position of a post-humously uttered "I told you so!"
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]