Facebook Changes News Feed Yet Again To Promote “Authentic” Content

facebook iconFacebook took another swing in its ongoing fight against fake news this week when it introduced yet another change to News Feed.

This latest update tweaks the ranking algorithm of News Feed to better recognize fake or spammy content. Facebook created the change by analyzing pages that were already known to post spam and fake content, or pages that tried to game the system by asking for likes, comments and shares. The social media giant then created an algorithm to compare these culprits to other pages, allowing Facebook to quickly sort out the legit pages from the spammy ones.

Fortunately, the algorithm also takes user behavior into account. For instance, if a ton of users are hiding the posts from a given page, Facebook’s new system could intuit that the content being hidden is fake or annoying.

“One of our News Feed values is authentic communication,” the site said in a blog post announcing the changes. “We’ve heard from our community that authentic stories are the ones that resonate most — those that people consider genuine and not misleading, sensational or spammy.”

This is just one of a series of measures Facebook is rolling out to combat the problem of fake news and spam. By itself this measure won’t do the trick, but hopefully together, all of Facebook’s new features and updates can.


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