Mark Zuckerberg announced through a Facebook post yesterday that there are some changes that will be made to Facebook's "News Feed," in which users see posts and activity of their friends and family as well as organizations, news sources, and other sources. Facebook will begin surfacing news content based on the "trustworthiness" of those news sources, as determined by ongoing user surveys (rather than by Facebook itself).
In my opinion, I am tentative about these changes. While they may be a good measure to eliminate untrustworthy news sources, I think that the political views of users will influence how they rate the "trustworthiness" of news sources. For example, someone with conservative political views may rate a liberal-leaning news source, such as the New York Times, as not being very trustworthy simply because it is a "liberal" news source (and vice versa).
What do you guys think of these changes to Facebook's News Feed? Do you think it will stop the spread of misinformation or become a sort of user-driven censorship? For those of you that use Facebook somewhat regularly, do you think this will affect your news feed?
Sources:
Forbes
Reuters
Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook
1 comment:
I'm glad that Facebook is addressing the problem of inaccurate or untrustworthy news sources and is trying to combat this, but I'm not sure why they would allow the users to determine the trustworthiness of news, as I agree with Meiling that this is a pretty biased method. I think another problem could also arise with this method if users don't actually try to assess the trustworthiness of a news source and instead just agree with whatever other users say is trustworthy. To me, it would make more sense if Facebook just had experts review the credibility of news sources and then use this information to influence the News Feed.
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