Facebook roping in users to fight misinformation

Facebook is roping in its users to help fight misinformation and fake news and from next week will allow its users to rank news sources.  News sources will be ranked by users as the most credible and trustworthy in order to prioritise them in Facebook's News Feed.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg described the new strategy as a 'big change'' and a ''major update'' that will ultimately lower the percentage of news inside News Feed from 5 per cent to 4 per cent.

"The hard question we've struggled with is how to decide what news sources are broadly trusted in a world with so much division," Zuckerberg wrote in a company blog post. "We decided that having the community determine which sources are broadly trusted would be most objective."

The move comes only about a week after Facebook announced it would dramatically overhaul its core News Feed product to focus more on engaging content from friends and family rather than "passive" content like text-laden videos or low-quality news.

According to commentators, the change is notable, however, given the social network's fear of being seen as an arbiter of news quality. It has kept away from ranking publications on credibility and has sought to combat misinformation by employing stopgap measures, including independent fact-checkers.

"There's too much sensationalism, misinformation and polarization in the world today," Zuckerberg said in a post. "Social media enables people to spread information faster than ever before, and if we don't specifically tackle these problems, then we end up amplifying them," he said.

News outlets that secure good scores could see their stories get more widely distributed on Facebook, while those with lower scores might see less activity. The new programme would not affect how much news people will see in their feed, according to the company.