Facebook Makes Updates to Its Trending Feature to Reduce the Prevalence of Fake News
In Social Media, Social Media News Brief, Social Networking | No comment
In the wake of the presidential election in November, Facebook received a great deal of criticism for spreading fake news that may have contributed to people’s views on different topics during the election. As a result, Facebook has been working on making some updates that are targeted at eliminating fake news and preventing the spread of fake news through Facebook. Some new changes have begun rolling out today that are made to control the spread of fake news through Facebook’s “trending” feature.
This feature was launched back in 2014 as a way for Facebook to help people find interesting and relevant discussions that were happening within Facebook. By making some changes to this feature, Facebook is hoping to avoid spreading fake news that many people are already discussing on their site by drawing further attention to it. They’ll be adding headlines that come directly from news sources and placing a line with the source below this to make it easier for people to see where the news is coming from.
In addition to adding clear statements about where the news is coming from, Facebook will stop targeting their “trending” topics at the individual and will instead be choosing topics that are more broadly targeted. This should make it so that the items that come up in this section are a lot more relevant to a larger number of people on the whole. It should also help to get the focus off of smaller articles that may be fake pieces of news.
One of the main ways that Facebook will now be working to block fake news stories is that they will have the “trending” feature ignore topics that come from a single news report in favor of ones that are covered by many media outlets. This is a good way for Facebook to prevent fake news stories from trending even if they are pieces that have a lot of people talking about them. By making these updates today, Facebook is hopeful that it can keep fake news out of the “trending” feature.