Facebook’s next news feed tweak: ranking ‘trusted’ sources

Last week Mark Zuckerberg kicked off his year of making sure your time on Facebook is “well spent” by announcing that feeds will refocus on items shared by friends, instead of news. Today the CEO followed up with an announcement that the site will try to identify and highlight “trusted sources” based on community feedback. While the combination of these changes is apparently only going to change the mix of news in feeds from five percent to four percent, its stated claim is to avoid ” sensationalism, misinformation and polarization.”

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, the VP of product management who oversees the news feed, Adam Mosseri, said “This is an interesting and tricky thing for us to pursue because I don’t think we can decide what sources of news are trusted and what are not trusted, the same way I don’t think we can’t decide what is true and what is not.” Under increasing scrutiny from the media, users and regulators about its control over the information seen by billions of people every day, it appears Facebook’s first choice is to attempt regulation by its own users.

Mosseri indicated that user rankings are still just one of the weights Facebook will use in ordering posts on the news feed, but it’s unclear exactly how the site will avoid potential attempts to game the system, whether by use of bots, coordinated group reporting or other means. However it works, according to Zuckerberg, this is just the start of a process to “prioritize news that is trustworthy, informative, and local.”

Source: Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)