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

Posted by BeauHD on from the fine-tuned dept.

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decrease in referral traffic or outbound clicks depending on if they share authentic, timely content vs inauthentic and outdated stories.

9 of 194 comments (clear)

  1. Automatically demotes stories by tomhath · · Score: 2, Interesting

    From:

    Washington Post
    Fox
    Huffington Post
    USAToday
    NYT
    MSNBC
    NPR
    Vox

  2. "get their posts hidden often" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

    So, another way to downmod conservative postings?

    Yay, Facebook! Protecting special snowflakes in their "progressive" echo chambers!

    1. Re:"get their posts hidden often" by Highdude702 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      When i read that i thought the exact same thing. So some easily offended people dont like seeing posts about certain things and "hide" them, now they get used as examples of fake news? what if it says "Donald Trump Is the 45th President of the United States of America" and liberals dont like that fact so 1 million of them hide that post. Is it now considered fake news? even know its a 100% true statment? Because from the summary thats exactly how it sounds like its going to work.

  3. Don't get your news from fb by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Simple solution is to read multiple news sources. Anyone who uses only one source be it FB or the NYT will have a skewed perspective and miss things.

  4. What about the rest of the BS? by ausekilis · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I've had to report and ignore more than one idiot still on their soapbox about vaccinations causing autism.

    5 minutes with Google will pull up that mercury was used as a preservative, had some correlation to autism, and hasn't been used since the Gov banned it in the 70's or 80's. And those research papers everyone pulls up? They all reference 1 paper, done in the 60's.

    I can't wait for the braindead, unwashed masses to actually have a few braincells capable of independent thought. Since these same idiots believe everything they read on the internet (primarily Facebook), changes like this may actually help.

  5. Re:Third-party fact checkers scares the... by Highdude702 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The problem is that most of the people that use those services dont really give a fuck about facts. They feel if youre not part of their bubble, you dont matter to them. especially if you disagree.

  6. Prioritize advertisers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    They will prioritize their advertisers, while links to competitors will be down graded.
    Links to HuffPo, CNN and WaPo will get priority while Fox, Breitbart and Drudge will get marked down.
    If you can't shift the perspective, what is the point of being a billionaire, except to own a Hawaiian Island?

  7. Re:Third-party fact checkers scares the... by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Snopes, FactCheck.org, Politifact, ABC News, and AP can be argued not to be impartial and to have a political agenda.

    All humans have personal opinions. What Snopes and the other sites do is investigate and publish with a list of their sources and explanation of them. That allows them to be publicly scrutinised and challenged. Fake news avoids such scrutiny, or accuses it of bias and conspiracy.

    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.

    Sorry, there is no "balance" when it comes to facts and the truth. Something is either true or it isn't. Alternate facts are just lies.

    Perhaps you want sites with an open conservative bias to also do fact checking. That's reasonable, but of course they will be open the same scrutiny as anyone else. Can you suggest one with a record as good as AP or Snopes or the BBC?

    Oh, and Kim Lacapria is a woman.

    --
    const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
    SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  8. Re:Better late than never by ckatko · · Score: 2, Interesting

    You realize #fakenews wasn't invented till AFTER the democrats lost the election, right?

    Don't believe me? Check Google Trends for fakenews.