Facebook Co-founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg is well aware of the time most of us spend on Facebook. And he wants to make sure that it is “time well spent.”
In a Facebook post, published on 19 January, Zuckerberg announced that Facebook will be updating its setting to make sure the news consumed is of high quality. This is the second such update in 2018, the first one being an update to ensure that the user sees less public content, including news, video and posts from brands, bringing down the news content from five percent to four percent.
Making the announcement about the “second major update,” Zuckerberg said that he has asked his product teams to prioritise news that is trustworthy, informative, and local.
Zuckerberg said that in order to decide “what news sources are broadly trusted in a world with so much division,” they would be asking the entire Facebook community and take the community’s feedback on determine the ranking. According to him, this would be most objective.
Explaining how it will work, Zuckerberg said:
However, this update will not change the amount of news visible to a user on Facebook, but will only shift the balance of news a user sees towards sources that are determined to be trusted by the community.
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