Facebook has made public its plan to prioritize news sources deemed to be more trustworthy on its News Feed.
The company, which has more than 2 billion monthly users, said its members, not experts or Facebook executives, would determine how news outlets rank in terms of trustworthiness based on the use of surveys from users.
Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said on Friday that Facebook Inc will prioritize “trustworthy” news in its feed of social media posts, using member surveys to identify high-quality outlets and fight sensationalism and misinformation.
The chief executive charted the shakeup in a post on Facebook, saying that starting next week the News Feed, the company’s centerpiece product, would prioritize “high quality news” over less trusted sources.
“There’s too much sensationalism, misinformation and polarization in the world today,” Zuckerberg wrote.
“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 said.
The decision is most likely to rattle the media landscape in nearly every country, given the ubiquity of the world’s largest social network and how central it has become in some places to the distribution of news.
Zuckerberg added that he is optimistic that the recently announced changes will shrink the amount of news on Facebook from 20 percent, to about 4 percent of all content. Adding that the change will affect not only links posted by news outlets but also news stories that individuals share.
The quality of news on Facebook has been called into question after alleged Russian operatives, for profit spammers and others spread false reports on the site, including during the 2016 U.S. election campaign.
Two years ago, Facebook users saw hoaxes saying Pope Francis endorsed Republican Donald Trump for U.S. president and that a federal agent investigating Democrat Hillary Clinton was found dead. Facebook initially proposed fighting false stories by letting users flag them.
