From Mr. Z's Facebook account;
Continuing our focus for 2018 to make sure the time we all spend on Facebook is time well spent...
Last week I announced a major change to encourage meaningful social
interactions with family and friends over passive consumption. As a
result, you'll see less public content, including news, video, and posts
from brands. After this change, we expect news to make up roughly 4% of
News Feed -- down from roughly 5% today. This is a big change, but news
will always be a critical way for people to start conversations on
important topics.
Today I'm sharing our second major update this
year: to make sure the news you see, while less overall, is high
quality. I've asked our product teams to make sure we prioritize news
that is trustworthy, informative, and local. And we're starting next
week with trusted sources.
There's too much sensationalism,
misinformation and polarization 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.
The hard question we've
struggled with is how to decide what news sources are broadly trusted in
a world with so much division. We could try to make that decision
ourselves, but that's not something we're comfortable with. We
considered asking outside experts, which would take the decision out of
our hands but would likely not solve the objectivity problem. Or we
could ask you -- the community -- and have your feedback determine the
ranking.
We decided that having the community determine which sources are broadly trusted would be most objective.
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
organizations are only trusted by their readers or watchers, and others
are broadly trusted across society even by those who don't follow them
directly. (We eliminate from the sample those who aren't familiar with a
source, so the output is a ratio of those who trust the source to those
who are familiar with it.)
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.
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.....
https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10104445245963251
