Facebook News Feed Update: News Ranking to Be Influenced by User Surveys

By Edward Leano, Christian Post Contributor Monday, January 22, 2018

As part of Facebook's planned changes to its news feed this year, the social media platform is trying to ensure that news articles come from "Trusted Sources." The company is planning to do this by running surveys.

Adam Mosseri, head of news feed for Facebook, describes the process they are doing to ensure the quality of news on the platform. Following the plans that they have outlined for the news feed for 2018, users will now see fewer posts from media outlets and brands.

To compensate, Facebook is now trying to make it so that the smaller amount of news on the news feed is of higher quality. According to their announcement, Facebook will begin testing their new ranking system that will prioritize news "from publications that the community rates as trustworthy."

They will determine these not by doing their own fact-checking, but by doing surveys.

"We surveyed a diverse and representative sample of people using Facebook across the US to gauge their familiarity with, and trust in, various different sources of news. This data will help to inform ranking in News Feed," Mosseri explained.

In other words, Facebook will be asking people if they trust a news source. Their response, in turn, will inform a ranking system that will prioritize news from sources determined as "trustworthy" this way, according to Tech Crunch.

As Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg explained in his post on Saturday, Jan. 20, this is all part of the idea that "having the community determine which sources are broadly trusted would be most objective." He explains that Facebook is not comfortable with making the decision themselves, or having outside experts to do it, and that the Facebook community could give them the feedback they need to rank news accordingly.

Facebook is also planning to roll out this initiative worldwide, after starting with the U.S.