The intrusive fake news spread through Facebook has made the company revamp its trending news algorithm to combat the viral fake news.
Facebook repolish its algorithm to determine the news becomes trending in order to fight the spread of fake news. Facebook VP of Product Management Will Cathcart introduces three new updates in its Trending News in an official release on Wednesday, Jan. 25.
Those three updates include the publisher's headline to be included in each topic name to provide more context on the news. Facebook also improved its algorithm to determine the trending news. Lastly all users in the same region will have the same trending news regardless of their personal preferences.
One of the most important ones is a change in the algorithm which determines how a topic can be categorized as Trending. In this update, the Trending category is determined by the number of news publishers posting the articles about similar topics on Facebook, combined with the user's engagement to those articles. This will make the selection process for Trending much easier and ensure only the real news will become Trending.
The improvement is expected to be effective to eliminate the spread of fake news which has gone viral on Facebook. The social media giant will also enhance its effort to keep the fake news from spreading.
We're listening to people's feedback," Cathcart said. " We will continue to make improvements in order to provide a valuable Trending experience."
According to report from USA Today, Facebook decided to improve its Trending algorithm after the feature sparked an outrage last spring. The feature has allegedly suppressed the views and voices of conservatives. Facebook then fired the news curator who filters the topics and adjusting it to their personal taste.
Combating fake news on the Internet has been the priority of Internet giants such as Facebook and Google to make the Internet a better place for people to interact. Watch the report from CBS News, regarding the mutual effort from Facebook and Google to fight fake news below:
