Facebook Algorithm Tweak to Favor 'Authentic' Content
Source: Angela Moscaritolo
Facebook on Tuesday announced two updates to its News Feed ranking algorithms intended to show you more "authentic and timely" stories when you log on, as opposed to fake news stories.
Going forward, the social network with be incorporating into its algorithm new signals — like whether posts are often being hidden by people who read them — to "better identify and rank authentic content," Facebook Research Scientists Akos Lada and James Li and Engineering Manager Shilin Ding wrote in the announcement. The idea is to bump up content people consider to be "genuine and not misleading, sensational or spammy," they added.
Facebook is also now taking into account how ranking signals — such as friends commenting on a story — change over time to determine what it shows you. If lots of people are talking about a specific topic, or a certain post is getting a ton of engagement, the site may surmise that the topic or post "might be temporarily more important to you," and it might show up higher in you feed.
"For example, 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," they wrote.
Meanwhile, Facebook this week announced it's working on a new account recovery tool for websites called Delegated Recovery. The feature, which will first be available on GitHub, will let Facebook users create a "recovery token" they can use to access other websites from which they've been locked out.
"Soon, we hope to open the ability for any service to improve its account recovery experience using Facebook," Security Engineer Brad Hill wrote in a blog post. "We also want to offer the ability for people to use other accounts, such as a GitHub account, to help you recover your access to Facebook."
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