At the beginning of the year, Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg wrote that he aims to make Facebook a better place and fix the problem that emphasizes on misinformation and abuse. Facebook is striving hard to minimise the amount of news content in the user’s News Feed and fill it with personal content from friends and relatives. However, it might take some time for the company to do this.
Facebook also announced the other major change that will only show news content from high-quality and trustworthy sources on the user’s News Feed. Interestingly, Facebook isn’t using any AI-powered system for this. Instead, the company is interested to use the old-school way by conducting public surveys to detect these high-quality and trustworthy sources.
Along with Twitter and Instagram, Facebook is the largest social network website in the world. The biggest power with Facebook is all about its homepage news feed. Where promotions and advertisement are also shown depending on the internet and cache. The advertisement is the main source of earning for a billion dollar company, Facebook.
Mark Zuckerberg wrote, “This update will not change the amount of news you see on Facebook. It will only shift the balance of news you see towards sources that are determined to be trusted by the community.”
The survey asks the users whether they are familiar with the news sources and if they are trustworthy or not. Facebook’s major goal is to find out whether the news source is trusted by its followers and regular readers or the source is considered trustworthy by other people also.
According to BuzzFeed, Facebook asks a two-question survey:
- Do you recognise the following websites? (Choices: Yes or No)
- How much do you trust each of these domains? (Choices: Entirely, A lot, Somewhat, Barely, Not at all)
This new initiative from Facebook aims to deprioritize content from various pages and focus on interactions between friends and family. This measure is taken to eliminate fake news from the social media platform. But the question is, Is it wise to rely on crowd-funded data to eliminate fake news as Facebook has played a major role in affecting the US Elections?
