Facebook's 2017 newsfeed algorithm tweak intentionally reduced traffic to left-leaning outlets " to avoid adding fuel to critics’ argument that the platform has an anti-conservative bias"... and overcorrected."Mother Jones saw a roughly $400,000 drop in the site’s annual revenue"

In 2018, we will prioritize News from publications that the community rates as trustworthy... that people find informative... relevant to people’s local community... We surveyed ... people using Facebook across the US to gauge their familiarity with, and trust in, various different sources ...

Users will be able to mark stories as fake...algorithm will look at whether a large number of people are reporting a particular article, whether or not the article is going viral, and whether the article has a high rate of shares... create an algorithm-vetted set of links that then goes on to a team of researchers within Facebook... links are sent…

A work in progress from an upcoming eponymous post. Another experiment with the enewsletter format: some initial thoughts on this seemingly intractable problem, with some of the source materials I’m studying.

Not only is Facebook not providing little red warnings along with links to potentially specious news—it’s now blocking links to the plugin that did... . “It would seem I’ve caused them some embarrassment by showing them to be full of bull when it comes to their supposed inability to address fake news and they are punishing me for it.”... Update #…

There’s large-scale, statistically significant research into the impact of search results on political views... Google is doing a horrible, horrible job of delivering answers here. It can and should do better... people are finally saying, ‘Gee, Facebook and Google really have a lot of power’ like it’s this big revelation. And it’s like, ‘D’oh.’”…

Zuckerberg’s emerging dilemma. He doesn’t want Facebook ... to be an arbiter of what’s legit and what’s not. But if Facebook is now going to prohibit fake news sites from using its ad network to sell ads, it will need a list of its own... Google has long had its own list of legitimate news sources... hasn’t apparently wanted to cut into its own…

There’s bad information out there that’s not necessarily fake. It’s never as clear-cut as you think... Facebook’s algorithm may not understand the various shades of falsehood. Facebook could tweak its algorithm to promote related articles from sites like FactCheck.org so they show up next to questionable stories on the same topic in the news fee…

There is no such thing as neutrality when it comes to media. That has long been a fiction... It’s also dangerous to assume that the “solution” is to make sure that “both” sides of an argument are heard equally... It is even more dangerous, however, to think that relying more on algorithms will remove this bias.Recognizing bias and enabling process…