Facebook has begun rolling out an update to its ‘Trending’ feature in an attempt to weed out fake news stories. Instead it will show users news from a range of balanced sources.
Trending will soon feature topics covered by several publishers, rather than showing the stories that are shared by the largest number of people. This is intended to make Facebook a more credible source of information.
Will Cathcart, the company’s Vice President of Product Management, said Facebook wants to direct it’s nearly 2 billion users toward topics that “reflect real world events being covered by multiple outlets”.
“It helps you know what’s going on across Facebook whether or not it matches up with what your friends are talking about”.
Will Cathcart, Facebook Vice President of Product Management
Facebook will also stop personalising Trending lists, so that everyone located in the same country sees the same top trends as each other.
Google already weeds out advertisers using Google Ads for making false and misleading claims. However, on Wednesday it said it was doing the same thing by reviewing @550 websites, permanently banning almost 200 published sites and temporarily cutting off another 140 sites from its AdSense scheme.
