Facebook Users Will Be Able To Rank News Source Trustworthiness

Facebook has been trying to combat fake news and have approached the problem in different ways. One of the ways was to flag articles that were deemed fake and added a tag to let users know that the article could contain inaccurate information. Facebook later revised this by displaying suggested articles that have been fact-checked to be accurate.

However it seems that Facebook is changing up their methods again. In a post by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, it seems that Facebook now wants to put the power into the hands of users, where Facebook users will soon be able to rank the trustworthiness of a new source themselves.

Talking about how would one determine if a source is trustworthy, Zuckerberg said that tey considered making the decision themselves or seeking outside help such as experts, but neither of these solutions could be considered truly objective, and so their solution would be to crowdsource opinions of their users. ”Or we could ask you — the community — and have your feedback determine the ranking.”

He adds, “Here’s how this will work. As part of our ongoing quality surveys, we will now ask people whether they’re familiar with a news source and, if so, whether they trust that source. The idea is that some news organizations are only trusted by their readers or watchers, and others are broadly trusted across society even by those who don’t follow them directly.”

Will this be an effective way of determining a source’s trustworthiness? That does raise some questions, but we guess we’ll have to wait and see if Facebook’s latest approach will be one that works.

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Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: Facebook