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In order to make Facebook more fun and less frustrating, the social media giant has announced it will use the indices of users who trust a news source against those who are familiar with it, to determine news ranking on the platform.
This is contained in separate releases published Facebook Head of News Feed, Adam Mosseri, and Facebook founder and Chief Executive Officer, Mark Zuckerberg, in efforts to make sure the time people spend on Facebook is time well spent.
In what seems to be Facebook’s manifesto for 2018, Zuckerberg had said the topnotch social media firm “has a lot of work to do” in the New Year, and that Facebook plans major changes to news feed from media and businesses to focus on personal interactions.
“Last week I announced a major change to encourage meaningful social interactions with family and friends over passive consumption.
“Today I’m sharing our second major update this year: to make sure the news you see, while less overall, is high quality.
“I’ve asked our product teams to make sure we prioritize news that is trustworthy, informative, and local. And we’re starting next week with trusted sources.
“We decided that having the community determine which sources are broadly trusted would be most objective.
“We will now ask people whether they’re familiar with a news source and, if so, whether they trust that source.
“We eliminate from the sample those who aren’t familiar with a source, so the output is a ratio of those who trust the source to those who are familiar with it,” Zuckerberg said.
Mosseri in a blog post said, “In 2018, we will prioritize: news from publications that the community rates as trustworthy, news that people find informative and news that is relevant to people’s local community”.
Facebook users have complained that the platform is becoming less fun and more frustrating.
“I just wish Facebook would work like it used to. I frequently cannot see things I have posted. I do not get current post from friends. I will check something out and when I go back, I am receiving notifications from days or even weeks earlier.
“I get ads from places I have absolutely no interest in. I have reset my preferences regularly and it does not help. I have other family members and friends who are having the same issues. Facebook has stopped being fun and is now frustrating,” one Facebook user lamented.
Zuckerberg has said all of these, and others would change.
“There’s too much sensationalism, misinformation and polarization in the world today. 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 expressly stated.
“This update will not change the amount of news you see on Facebook. It will only shift the balance of news you see towards sources that are determined to be trusted by the community.
“My hope is that this update about trusted news and last week’s update about meaningful interactions will help make time on Facebook time well spent,” he further stated.