Facebook Trending update will weed out fake news and smash ‘filter bubbles’
Social network prepares to roll out changes designed to make sure user encounter genuine news from a balanced range of sources
Facebook is updating its "trending" feature in a bid to root out fake news stories.
From now on, Facebook's trending list will consist of topics being covered by several publishers rather than showcasing stories which are shared the largest number of people.
The switch is intended to make Facebook a more credible source of information by steering hordes of its 1.8 billion users toward topics that "reflect real world events being covered by multiple outlets," said Will Cathcart, the company's vice president of product management.
Facebook also will stop customising trending lists to cater to each user's personal interests.
Instead, everyone located in the same region will see the same trending lists, which currently appear in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia and India.
That change could widen the scope of information Facebook's users see, instead of just topics that reinforce what they may have already heard or read elsewhere.
The broader perspective might reduce the chances of Facebook's users living in a "filter bubble" only engaging with people and ideas with which they agree.
Facebook introduced its trending list in 2014 in response to the popularity of a similar feature on Twitter, the short-messaging service that competes for people's attention and advertising revenue.
Questions about Facebook's influence on what people are reading intensified last summer after a technology blog relying on an anonymous source reported that human editors routinely suppressed conservative viewpoints on the site.
Facebook fired the small group of journalists overseeing its trending items and replaced them with an algorithm that was supposed to be a more neutral judge about what to put on the list.
But the automated approach began to pick out posts that were getting the most attention, even if the information in them was bogus.
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To discourage the creation of fake news in the first place, Facebook also is banishing perpetual publishers of false information from its lucrative ad network.
Google, which operates an even larger digital ad network, has taken a similar stand against publishers of fake news.
In a report released Wednesday, Google said it had exiled about 200 publishers from its AdSense network for various misrepresentations as part of a review conducted during the six weeks of last year.
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