Facebook changes feed to push real news over fake and sensational

Looks like Facebook is finally making some concerted efforts at fighting fake and sensational news. The social network has introduced a ranking algorithm change that detects and promotes content “that people consider genuine, and not misleading, sensational, or spammy.”

As per the latest changes in the news feed, Facebook has categorised pages that are known for sharing inauthentic posts. This also includes clickbait headlines. Facebook then used the posts sourced from these pages to train an all new algorithm. This means that the social networking platform will now give extra feed visibility to posts that don’t show signs of similarity to inauthentic content.

But that’s not all. Facebook also wants to more quickly surface big stories going viral either because the topic is being posted about by lots of people, or a Page post about the topic is seeing tons of engagement. Facebook will then take that as a signal that you might temporarily care more about the topic, and therefore show it in your News Feed while it’s still hot. This move will surely help it compete with Twitter for in-the-moment news sharing.

Post the hue and cry over allegations that fake news in its feed helped get Donald Trump Facebook has become cautious with its news feed. Last month it announced a slew of feature updates including partnerships with third-party fact checkers to add warning labels to fake news stories.