News Feed FYI: helping ensure news on Facebook is from trusted sources

January 19, 2018

By Adam Mosseri, Head of News Feed

Last week, we announced major changes to News Feed that are designed to help bring people closer together by encouraging more meaningful connections on Facebook. As a result, people will see less public content, including news, video and posts from brands.

Today we’re sharing the second major update we’re making this year: to make sure the news people see, while less overall, is high quality.

Last year, we worked hard to reduce fake news and clickbait, and to destroy the economic incentives for spammers to generate these articles in the first place. But there is more we can do. In 2018, we will prioritize:

• News from publications that the community rates as trustworthy
• News that people find informative
• News that is relevant to people’s local community

To be clear, you can still decide which stories appear at the top of News Feed with our See First feature.

Trusted Sources

Starting next week, we will begin tests in the first area: to prioritize news from publications that the community rates as trustworthy.

How? We surveyed a diverse and representative sample of people using Facebook across the US to gauge their familiarity with, and trust in, various different sources of news. This data will help to inform ranking in News Feed.

We’ll start with the US and plan to roll this out internationally in the future.

Informative Content

When we rank and make improvements to News Feed, we rely on a set of core values. These values — which we’ve been using for years — guide our thinking and help us keep the central experience of News Feed intact as it evolves. One of our News Feed values is that the stories in your feed should be informative.

For informative sources, we will continue to improve on the work we first announced in August 2016, where we began asking people to rank the informativeness of updates in their feed on a scale of one to five.

We’re evaluating ways to expand this work to more areas this year.

Local News

Finally, people want more local news on Facebook. As we announced this month, we’re making it easier for people to see local news and information in a dedicated section. We’ll continue to work on ways to show more local news that is relevant to where people live.

What This Means for Publishers

We’ll be working on these efforts for the rest of the year. 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.

These changes will be part of the many signals that go into News Feed ranking.