Facebook Makes Updates to News Feed to Provide Better 'Authentic Content'

Facebook is continuing to make updates to its news feed, including new ways to identify authentic content and to provide relevant posts to users in real time. In a Tuesday blog post, research scientists Akos Lada and James Li and engineering manager Shilin Ding wrote that the social media site is adding "universal signals" to determine authentic stories, which users consider to be "genuine and not misleading, sensational or spammy. To do this, we 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," they wrote. "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." One that's authentic may rank higher in a user's news feed, they wrote. The other update, they added, will rank content higher in a user's news feed through real-time engagement from many people on Facebook about a topic or a lot of engagement on a post from a page. "If your favorite soccer team just won a game, we might show you posts about the game higher up in News Feed because people are talking about it more broadly on Facebook," the three wrote. Facebook has been making improvements as it fends off complaints about bias, censorship and fake news on its site (see 1612150035 and 1701250083). In a separate blog post, Facebook said it's expanding current measurement partnerships to provide cross-channel comparability and third-party verification and increase transparency. On Monday, Interactive Advertising Bureau President Randall Rothenberg said at the industry group's annual event that there is a "linear connection" between fake news and click fraud, fraudulent nonhuman traffic, data breaches, privacy violations and ad-blocking sources. He said fake news costs companies but also is a "moral failure" and "implicates marketers, agencies, publishers, platforms, and technology companies alike." He said all such interests need to help address and stop fake news.