Facebook confirmed this Thursday (17/12) that it will reverse an internal mechanism in its algorithm that prioritized the appearance of reliable news in users' feeds.
According to information from the The New York Times, the decision goes against a group of employees of the Facebook who wanted the mechanism to continue. According to a company spokesman, Joe Osborne, it was already planned that the change would be temporary.
“This was a change to limit the spread of inaccurate claims about the election,” Osborne explained in an interview with the website The Verge. “News is a small portion of what people see on Facebook, and political news is an even smaller fraction of that content,” he continued. “We’re still making sure people see trustworthy and informative news on Facebook, especially during larger news cycles and on important global topics like elections, COVID-19 and climate change.”
After the 2020 presidential election, Facebook saw a huge increase in news stories with misleading content. To mitigate misinformation, the platform created an internal index for news reliability, called NEQ (in Portuguese, “news ecosystem quality”). As a result, outlets considered neutral such as the Times, NPR and CNN saw an increase in traffic, while the flow of partisan sites with more “inflammatory” information decreased.
Disinformation in the crosshairs
Facebook has also taken action against election misinformation. In October, the platform announced that after the election, it would ban political ads in the United States and label all posts about the election, redirecting users to official information. The company also restricted paid posts for candidates.
Facebook says that since the end of the election, there has been a decrease in the amount of news or posts with a political slant.
Image: Brett Jordan/Unsplash
