Facebook will prioritize ‘trusted’ news

Facebook is going to give news sources a ‘ranking’, which indicates how reliable a source is. Starting next week, the social networking site will begin implementation, starting by asking users how familiar they are with a particular resource.

The renewals were announced by Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a post on the website. According to the CEO, users will soon be asked whether they are familiar with a particular news source, and if so, whether they also trust the news source. In this way, Facebook hopes to eventually get a ranking from the most reliable sources.

After rankings are clear, this will start to affect how often a particular news source will appear in a user’s feed; reliable sources will appear more often than sources that are less trusted. The change does not affect the amount of news that appears in the feed.

Facebook says it has struggled with how to indicate the level of trustworthiness of news sources. The social network does not want to rely on ratings from experts, because this could create doubts about objectivity, which ultimately led to the decision to leave the assessment to the community.

Earlier this month, Facebook also announced that it will make changes to the news feed. Ultimately, according to the site, users should spend less time on the site by prioritizing showing messages that the software thinks the user would like to see. Ultimately, this should promote interaction between people. These changes should be implemented in the coming months, which will see pages from businesses, media and organizations diminish in reach.