Following on from Facebook’s previous announcement that it will be downgrading posts from media outlets in favour of video content and posts from friends, the social media giant has now announced it will be allowing users to decide a publishers’ trustworthiness.
In an attempt to combat the ‘Fake News’ phenomenon, Facebook will now ask its users whether they know a news source and find it reliable. The results of these surveys will determine how widely posts from a particular publisher appear in news feeds.
“I’ve asked our product teams to make sure we prioritize news that is trustworthy, informative, and local,” wrote Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg in a post.
“The hard question we’ve struggled with is how to decide what news sources are broadly trusted in a world with so much division. We could try to make that decision ourselves, but that’s not something we’re comfortable with.
“We considered asking outside experts, which would take the decision out of our hands but would likely not solve the objectivity problem.”
The team ultimately came to the conclusion that “having the community determine which sources are broadly trusted would be most objective.”
