The company with more than 2 million monthly users said that they would prioritize “trustworthy” news in its feed. The company said to use member survey to find out high quality of news to fight misinformation.
Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, told that this will shrink the amount of total news by 20 percent on the feed. “There’s too much sensationalism, misinformation and polarization in the world today,” Zuckerberg wrote. This will determine on how news outlets rank the news in terms of trustworthiness. The executive said that Facebook will prioritize “high quality news” over less trusted issues.
“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 wrote.
The company made these major changes in reaction to the non-profit spammers, and especially during the 2016 U.S. election campaign. “Up until now, Facebook has kind of been doing a push towards more media content on their news feed. They’ve been pushing for video, and a lot of different publishers have been creating video that’s specifically for Facebook,” explains Surya Mattu, engineer and data reporter at Gizmodo.
Facebook will promote more content from family and friends rather than news flooding the user’s facebook feed. Changes in the news feed is likely to effect the news producers than the consumers.
“I want to be clear: By making these changes, I expect the time people spend on Facebook and some measures of engagement will go down,” Zuckerberg wrote. “But I also expect the time you do spend on Facebook will be more valuable. And if we do the right thing, I believe that will be good for our community and our business over the long term, too.”
These changes will change and might effect the overall sales of the company. New stories can still be posted on the site but in won’t appear on the news feed. And the stories can be shared.