Facebook announced on With You AgainFriday that news isn't disappearing from your News Feed, but the social network is placing quite the heavy hand on what it decides to show you.
SEE ALSO: Facebook became your news diet. Now, it's going to serve you junk.The social network will begin incorporating user feedback on which news outlets should be trusted, a change that could be even more important due to the company's recent move to downgrade how much publisher content ends up in users' News Feeds.
It's a dramatic shift for Facebook, which has generally shied away from making judgement calls on the quality of content in lieu of letting users decide what they want to see.
Facebook's previous efforts to curate the news ended with controversy. The company fired editors who curated what content users saw shortly after the practice was exposed. Those editors reportedly shied away from featuring conservative news outlets, according to former employees.
But that was before Facebook faced the wrath of users and U.S. lawmakers for spreading fake news and potentially manipulating the 2016 presidential election.
"There's too much sensationalism, misinformation and polarization in the world today. 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," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post announcing the changes.
The move immediately poses a question: How does Facebook know what's trustworthy? No, Zuckerberg isn't looking to President Trump's Fake News Awards for answers. Rather, Facebook is surveying its users on what sources are trusted.
Facebook surveyed "a diverse and representative sample of people using Facebook across the US," according to a blog post from Facebook's head of News Feed Adam Mosseri.
That survey is one of several signals Facebook is using to "inform" the ranking, according to the post, but did not elaborate on the other factors.
Facebook also said it is working on elevating local news, not particularly in News Feed but by growing a separate section called "Today In," which it announced earlier this month.
Zuckerberg still wants news to be a part of Facebook, just to a lesser extent. As of Friday news makes up about 5 percent of content in News Feed (after last week's announced changes), and the company expects that to drop to 4 percent, Zuckerberg revealed in his Facebook post.
For publishers, the change to prioritize "trusted sources" could be either great or horrible news.
Facebook admitted in its blog post that publishers will either see an increase or decrease in traffic based on the company's chosen ranking.
"For the first change in the US next week, publications deemed trustworthy by people using Facebook may see an increase in their distribution. Publications that do not score highly as trusted by the community may see a decrease," the blog post reads.
Facebook did not disclose what media outlets made the cut based on the survey results and other factors. Mosseri's blog post did link to the company's "Publisher Principles," which outline what the company believes is meaningful content that will perform well on the platform.
So far, the new prioritization is only rolling out in the U.S.
Topics Facebook Social Media Elections Politics
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