Facebook Changes Feed To Promote Posts That Aren't Fake, Sensational, Or Spam (techcrunch.com)

TechCrunch is reporting that Facebook is prioritizing "authentic" content in News Feed with a ranking algorithm change that detects and promotes content "that people consider genuine, and not misleading, sensational, or spammy." The algorithm will also boost stories that are going viral in real-time. From the report: To build the update, Facebook categorized Pages that frequently share inauthentic posts like fake news and clickbaity headlines, or get their posts hidden often. It then used these posts to train an algorithm that detects similar content as its shared in the News Feed. Facebook will now give extra feed visibility to posts that don't show signs of similarity to inauthentic content. Meanwhile, Facebook wants to more quickly surface big stories going viral either because the topic is being posted about by lots of people, or a Page post about the topic is seeing tons of engagement. Facebook will then take that as a signal that you might temporarily care more about the topic, and therefore show it in your News Feed while it's still hot. Facebook says it doesn't anticipate significant changes to most Pages' News Feed distribution, but some might see a small increase or decrease in referral traffic or outbound clicks depending on if they share authentic, timely content vs inauthentic and outdated stories.

Comments

Third-party fact checkers scares the...

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Third-party fact checkers scares the hell out of me. Snopes, FactCheck.org, Politifact, ABC News, and AP can be argued not to be impartial and to have a political agenda. If that can be proven out then only one voice will truly be heard on Facebook.

• Snopes ran by Kim Lacapria who self describes herself as 'openly left-leaning and a liberal.'
• FactCheck.org and Politifact - Trump quoted an article about the number of deaths via the poorly ran Vetrans Adminstration. Trump was reported as giving false facts. When the original CNN article came out the article was reported as completely true.

I can point out similar instances with the other sources. I'm not totally against using these sources but I want a balance from the other sources on the other side of the political aisle.