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Facebook to Prioritize 'Trustworthy' News Sources

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

Fnord666 writes:

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

looorg writes:

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: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 22 2018, @11:45AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 22 2018, @11:45AM (#626034)

    Trust any of them? Not a chance in hell. The last vestige of trust that I placed in any news source, was CNN in it's early days. But, they screwed the pooch several times, even before they crawled into bed with the progressive crowd. What - I should trust Fox, because they are opposite CNN? That's pretty damned stupid, too. We have opposing gangs of theives and liars - I should pick one, and trust them?

    You should read Robert Anton Wilson's description of strange loops in the Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy. (IMO the 3 greatest novels ever written).
    If you believe the information you are given, you are wrong. If you disbelieve it you are still wrong.

    Actually you should just read the whole trilogy. Find the individual books if you can, the 3 in 1 current edition cuts a lot to make it fit. It's nearly 40 years old and it's still one of the most insightful descriptions of Unistat, and one of the most simultaneously hilarious, depressive and mind-expanding books ever.

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