Starting today, Facebook will update the way news is ranked in its News Feed to prioritize original reports, executives explain to Axios. It will also degrade stories that are not transparent about who wrote them.
Because it is important: The tech giant has long been criticized for not doing enough to raise quality news about hyperparty noise. Now, he’s trying to get ahead of that narrative as the 2020 elections get closer.
Details: Facebook says that to identify which original stories to promote, it will use artificial intelligence to analyze groups of articles on a particular topic and identify the ones that are most frequently cited as the original source.
- This will not change the News Feed experience dramatically. for most users, because Facebook will only show media stories that they or their friends follow. But the tech giant will push the most original story within that subset.
- The company has been having active conversations. with publishing executives, both commercially and editorially, to help define “original reports” so you can build signals on your algorithms to drive original stories, along with conducting user research.
- Algorithm changes only apply to news. For now, the tech giant is focusing on stories in English. He hopes to expand to other languages in the future.
Between lines: Along with those changes, Facebook will also begin to downgrade the news in its algorithm that has no broad outlines, or feature information about the company’s editorial staff on the publishers’ website.
- He says that in certain markets this may be more difficult to apply because anonymity is used to protect journalists.
The panorama: News aggregation has changed dramatically in recent years as platforms face pressure to clean up their content.
- The algorithms on rival Facebook and Google, which used to reward publishers who produced fast and dynamic content that was easy to add, are now being adjusted to reward more thoughtful original content.
- This has resulted in fewer spam headlines, clickbait and junk news.
- Google said last year that it tweaked its algorithms and the guidelines used by people who rate its search results to elevate original reports.
Whats Next: Facebook says publishers may see an increase in traffic from the original reports, but anticipates that most news publishers will not see significant changes to their News Feed distribution due to the changes.
The bottom line: It is a minor but concrete adjustment that Facebook can point out how to do something to minimize misinformation.
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