How Facebook Is Trying To Fight Fake News In Your News Feed

Facebook Inc FB is tweaking its News Feed to show people the stories that are most authentic and relevant to them. The update follows series of complaints that user’s feeds are spammed with misleading and unauthentic content.

“When ranking News Feed we look at many signals personal to you, such as how close you are to the person or Page posting, as well as more universal signals like the overall engagement (likes, comments, shares) that a post has,” Facebook said in a statement.

Facebook is adding new universal signals to determine whether a post is authentic or not. To do this, Facebook 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,” Facebook added.

Facebook will always look at real-time signals, such as whether a friend has just commented on it, to determine the relevance of a post. From now on, the social media giant will consider how signals change in real time. As a result, chances are higher that if a page/topic’s engagement levels are high, it might show higher in your feed.