Face(CIA)book To Start Ranking News Sources, Promote Only The “Most Trustworthy”

Friday, January 19, 2018
By Paul Martin

by Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge.com
Fri, 01/19/2018

One week after it emerged that FaceBook has finally thrown in the towel on free speech, and would henceforth mute accounts it deems “untrustworthy”, leaving open the question of just how would Zuckerberg would decide who is or isn’t trustworthy, on Friday we got the answer.

In a blog post, the company revealed its plans to start ranking news sources in its feed based on user evaluations of credibility, in what Facebook said will be a step in its effort to fight “false and sensationalist information” which also will push the company even deeper into a role it has long sought to avoid— that of what the WSJ called a “content referee”, and which we would define even simpler: the internet’s biggest censor.

This is how the company explained the biggest change in its content aggregation and distribution in years:

Last year, we worked hard to reduce fake news and clickbait, and to destroy the economic incentives for spammers to generate these articles in the first place. But there is more we can do. In 2018, we will prioritize:

News from publications that the community rates as trustworthy
News that people find informative
News that is relevant to people’s local community
To be clear, you can still decide which stories appear at the top of News Feed with our See First feature.

Last week, we announced major changes to News Feed that are designed to help bring people closer together by encouraging more meaningful connections on Facebook. As a result, people will see less public content, including news, video and posts from brands.

Today we’re sharing the second major update we’re making this year: to make sure the news people see, while less overall, is high quality.

Starting next week, we will begin tests in the first area: to prioritize news from publications that the community rates as trustworthy.

How? We surveyed a diverse and representative sample of people using Facebook across the US to gauge their familiarity with, and trust in, various different sources of news. This data will help to inform ranking in News Feed.

We’ll start with the US and plan to roll this out internationally in the future.

The Rest…HERE

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