You’ll see more original news content on Facebook soon
With a lot of fake information being shared on social media, it’s easy to lose trust in news websites nowadays. Of course, we all want our news source to be credible and informative. Perhaps that’s the reason Facebook‘s statement that it will give priority to original news reporting. This said to be as part of an effort to divert attention from spam, clickbait, and specious articles.
Priority on original content and transparent authorship
Facebook is now updating the way they are ranking news stories in the News Feed. It declared that it will prioritize original reporting and stories with transparent authorship. The basis will come from user research and feedback from news publishers and academic experts.
It will now prioritize articles in News Feed that it identifies as original reporting on a developing story or topic. To do this, the social media platform will analyze a group of articles on a specific topic or story. After that, they’ll search the ones that are most often cited as the original source. Facebook noted that they are only working with stories in English but they plan to do the same for news in other languages.
Aside from that, Facebook added that users will still see the news stories from the sources they follow or their friends follow. It’s just when publishers shared several stories and they are available in a person’s News Feed, it will boost the more original one which will help it get more distribution.
Moreover, Facebook is going to demote news content that does not have transparent information about the publisher’s editorial staff. Of course, it will review news articles for bylines or a staff page to determine who is behind the story. It explains that publishers who do not include this information often lack credibility to readers and produce content with clickbait or ad farms.
This changes from Facebook will definitely benefit not only the publishers but also the readers. We certainly hope that this improvement will lessen or even eliminate the fake news we are seeing on this platform. Do you guys agree?
