MISINFORMATION SHUTOFF

Zuckerberg Flipped Secret Switch Favoring Credible News Outlets on Facebook After the Election: NYT

The drastic shift, intended to fight rampant election misinformation problems, resulted in skyrocketing popularity for mainstream publishers and a downturn for hyperpartisan pages.

In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg approved a change to the social network’s News Feed ranking algorithm that favored more credible journalistic outlets, The New York Times reports. The drastic shift, intended to fight rampant election misinformation problems, resulted in skyrocketing visibility for mainstream publishers like CNN and NPR and a downturn in engagement for hyper-partisan pages like Breitbart and Occupy Democrats. Facebook reportedly evaluates news outlets on a clandestine metric titled “news ecosystem quality,” which ranks the authority and trustworthiness of their journalism, and the shift in the News Feed system weighted organizations with high N.E.Q. more heavily. Some employees pushed for the change to remain a permanent feature, but Facebook executive Guy Rosen told the Times that “there has never been a plan to make these permanent.”