
Facebook changes algorithm to boost original reporting - jbegley
https://www.axios.com/facebook-algorithm-original-reporting-e127c8b7-c749-4120-a65e-239b55d18758.html
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rmrk
"it will use artificial intelligence to analyze groups of articles on a
particular story topic and identify the ones most often cited as the original
source."

and

"Facebook will also begin to down-rank news in its algorithm that doesn't have
bylines, or present information about the company's editorial staff on the
publishers' website."

Okay those are the new requirements for content mills and fake propaganda
outlets. How long before they adapt?

Actually vetting reporters, reportage and news outlets is really hard for a
team of smart humans editors to do. Even the premiere organizations like the
NYT and Washington Post with their armies of editors has failed at this from
time to time. Algorithms are not ready for this task yet.

~~~
rhizome
> _" it will use artificial intelligence to analyze groups of articles on a
> particular story topic and identify the ones most often cited as the
> original source."_

Great idea, they should give it a snappy name, maybe something that rhymes
with "stage tank." Of course this does nothing WRT organizations that tend not
to cite earlier reportage when it originates outside of the company.

> _How long before they adapt?_

Why, that would require creating a staff of fake names, so in a lot of cases
it'll probably be completed sometime around close of business today. Maybe the
end of the week.

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basch
Deduping blogspam and re-reporting of AP/Reuters, and using that redundancy to
uprank the original source, is something Facebook should have been doing a
decade ago.

It should be more akin to [https://techmeme.com](https://techmeme.com) (or hn
for that matter) where they editorially try and choose the first or best
source. If a better source becomes available they swap. Facebook could benefit
from this dynamicness, where a story can bump and replace an existing post.

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mgraczyk
This is the actual press release. Shame on axios for not linking to it.

[https://about.fb.com/news/2020/06/prioritizing-original-
news...](https://about.fb.com/news/2020/06/prioritizing-original-news-
reporting-on-facebook/)

~~~
djohnston
is this irony?

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r721
>In conjunction with those changes, Facebook will also begin to down-rank news
in its algorithm that doesn't have bylines, or present information about the
company's editorial staff on the publishers' website.

Will they down-rank The Economist, I wonder? :)

~~~
mc32
I imagine they can whitelist known trustworthy entities that follow some
modicum of rules.

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caiobegotti
This is a critical bit that won't address the problem worldwide:

 _For now, the tech giant is focusing on stories in English. It hopes to
expand to other languages in the future._

~~~
chillacy
It's pretty typical for companies to start with English and expand from there.
Siri had a similar arc, now it supports 20ish and continues to grow.

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tumetab1
It seems these days opaque machine learning models means transparency.

I would prefer they would say that they're down grading their preference for
user engagement, and time on platform, for what the trained model says it's
original reporting.

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zitterbewegung
Well this is the next logical step for AdTech. Since all of the newspapers and
other media outlets have been disrupted by the rest of the AdTech industry the
next step would be to allow for people to create content on the platform and
then you keep your moat.

