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Facebook to Make Sure News Consumed is “High Quality”: Zuckerberg

This update will not change the amount of news visible to a user on Facebook

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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.

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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.

There’s too much sensationalism, misinformation and polarisation in the world today. 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. That’s why it’s important that News Feed promotes high quality news that helps build a sense of common ground.   
Mark Zuckerberg   

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:

Here’s how this will work. As part of our ongoing quality surveys, we will now ask people whether they’re familiar with a news source and, if so, whether they trust that source. The idea is that some news organisations are only trusted by their readers or watchers, and others are broadly trusted across society, even by those who don’t follow them directly.   

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.

My hope is that this update about trusted news and last week’s update about meaningful interactions will help make time on Facebook time well spent: Where we’re strengthening our relationships, engaging in active conversations rather than passive consumption, and, when we read news, making sure it’s from high quality and trusted sources.   

(At The Quint, we are answerable only to our audience. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member. Because the truth is worth it.)

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Topics:  Facebook   Mark Zuckerberg 

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