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. (We eliminate from the sample those who aren’t familiar with a source, so the output is a ratio of those who trust the source to those who are familiar with it.)
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.
~ Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg
This… yeah, it’s basically just saying “do you know of this source so we can count your opinion? If we get enough people from that who trust the source, we’ll use it.”
Which, yeah, is a terrible way to go about things. It’s painfully hackable. Because it’s not like there aren’t bot user accounts on Facebook who will promote the propaganda outlets… No bot accounts at all.
Cripes, this is myopic as hell.
