A “ranking” system for news sources on Facebook

Facebook recently rolled out a survey system that ranks media outfits according to trustworthiness.

The survey is part of ongoing changes in the Facebook ecosystem – aimed at prioritizing the posts of media outfits that have high trust ratings over those that have low ratings from appearing on News Feeds.

Discussed in a post by Mark Zuckerberg dated January 20, the survey and ranking system is part of Zuckerberg’s plans to make engaging on Facebook a time well spent.

A part of the post reads: “Here’s how this will work: As part of our ongoing quality surveys, we will now ask people whether they’re familiar with a news source and, if so, whether they trust that source. The idea is that some news organizations are only trusted by their readers or watchers, and others are broadly trusted across society even by those who don’t follow them directly.”

“This update will not change the amount of news you see on Facebook. It will only shift the balance of news you see towards sources that are determined to be trusted by the community,” Zuckerburg’s post further reads.

Zuckerberg did not indicate how different or similar the survey would be across media organizations based in various countries, nor did he elaborate on how “hands on” or “hands off” Facebook would be in terms of curating a media outfit’s trustworthiness.

The post and ranking system has sparked some questions over how effective the move would be, with a number of industry analysts noting that relying on the input of users to judge the quality of news in Facebook could backfire for the social network – leading it towards the arena of reality TV programming.