Facebook has been having a fake news problem for a while now, but it was only last year that it was discovered how much trouble it could be, so much so that the social network has been actively coming up with ways to combat it. It also doesn’t help that they can’t really control what someone chooses to share, even if it is fake news.However while Facebook can’t stop someone from sharing fake news, they can at least try to hide if from others which is what they’re doing with an updated and tweaked News Feed. In an announcement, Facebook has revealed that they will be making some changes to the News Feed in which more “authentic” stories will be more visible, while fake news and posts with clickbait-headlines will be buried.
According to Facebook, “To do this, we categorized Pages to identify whether or not they were posting spam or trying to game feed by doing things like asking for likes, comments or shares. We then used posts from these Pages to train a model that continuously identifies whether posts from other Pages are likely to be authentic. For example, if Page posts are often being hidden by people reading them, that’s a signal that it might not be authentic.”
In addition, they are also looking at real-time signals, such as whether or not a friend has commented on it, or if there is high engagement in which they will then determine that the post might be important to you, at least for now, and it will show higher in your feed. Hopefully with this changes, the days of fake news and clickbait articles being shared on Facebook will come to an end.
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