Facebook has something of a fake news problem and this is something that the company has taken steps to ensure will not happen again. One of the ways they plan on putting an end to that problem is with its Trending topics feature, which in an announcement by the company, this is a feature that they’re going to make some changes to.According to Facebook, “Trending uses a variety of signals from News Feed, including when people report news as fake or spam, to help prevent fake news, hoaxes or spam from appearing in Trending. Today’s update may also help prevent hoaxes and fake news from appearing in Trending because the updated system identifies groups of articles shared on Facebook instead of relying solely on mentions of a topic.”
What’s included in this update? Basically with each Trending topic, the publisher’s name will appear along with the topic, which should help users identify who is posting. So in the case of a reputable publisher, if you were to see their name there’s a good chance that the information posted will be accurate.
Facebook has also made changes as to how topics are identified as trending. Prior to this Facebook relied on high engagement which means that if it was fake news that was being shared, it would consider it “trending”. However now Facebook takes into account the number of publishers that are sharing a similar topic.
The social network has also taken steps to ensure that everyone in the same region sees the same topics, which should help everyone get up to speed on the same things. These changes should be live so do check it out if you’re interested.
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