Facebook's new update to News Feed will prioritize trustworthy publishers

Facebook has lately been making a lot of changes to its platform to give users a more custom experience. Yet again, the social network giant has announced a major update to its News Feed section. Facebook will only prioritize news content that is published by trustworthy publishers. Furthermore, users will be shown informative and relevant news. The company is rolling out this update "to make sure the news people see, while less overall, is high quality".

Announcement for this update comes from Facebook's head of News Feed, Adam Mosseri, who published a blog post yesterday. Facebook will release the update first in the US, followed by a wider international roll out. Starting as soon as next week, users staying in the US will see more content by publishers that are deemed trustworthy by the community.

The company has surveyed "a diverse and representative sample" of the US-based people about their familiarity and trust in various sources of news, reads the blog post. The data will be the deciding factor in the News Feed rankings. As part of these ongoing quality surveys, Facebook will now ask people whether or not they're familiar with a news source and if they trust it.

The company's CEO Mark Zuckerberg provided a bit more insight about this move in a post. "The idea is that some news organizations are only trusted by their readers or watchers, and others are broadly trusted across society even by those who don't follow them directly," stated Zuckerberg. "(We eliminate from the sample those who aren't familiar with a source, so the output is a ratio of those who trust the source to those who are familiar with it.)"

Once the update reaches, publications deemed trustworthy by people using Facebook may see an increase in their distribution. On the other hand, publications that do not score highly as trusted by the community may see a decrease.

Mosseri said that these changes to the News Feed are made in an attempt to "help bring people closer together by encouraging more meaningful connections on Facebook". After the update, news would make roughly make up 4 percent of content in News Feed, instead of 5 percent as it was earlier.

"My hope is that this update about trusted news and last week's update about meaningful interactions will help make time on Facebook time well spent: where we're strengthening our relationships, engaging in active conversations rather than passive consumption, and, when we read news, making sure it's from high quality and trusted sources," Zuckerberg added further.