Large online platforms continue to fight against the proliferation of false news. Google gave data yesterday about its battle against them when it talked about how it was combating fraudulent ads, and this dawn Facebook has announced the reformulation of its Trending Topics to try that they are reduced less news to them.
Following these new changes, it takes the first steps in the announced plan to create a healthy news ecosystem with journalists. From now on the trends will no longer reflect the themes most commented and shared among the users, but a series of topics that are being covered by certain means.
This is a total change to the system they had so far, one in which the interests of users are pushed into the background to show themes reflecting “real-world events.” With this, they hope to be able to remove the slab from being considered a hive of false information to try to become a credible source.
Also, this list of popular topics will no longer be customized depending on the interests of each . Instead, all people living in the same region will see exactly the same list of related topics. For now, these new trending topics will appear in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and India.
Another new feature that will bring this new system of outstanding themes will be the way to show them. In the trend chart, instead of simply seeing the most interesting terms, below each one will appear a small description of the news , as well as the web address of the medium from which it has been extracted.
Will this change suffice?
If anything confirms once again all these changes is that the efforts of the social network to fight the false news until now had been insufficient. Therefore, the Zuckerberg have no other than to throw away the system they had used so farand create a new one based on news selected from other media.
This distances them a little more from their previous position of social network to bring them closer to the digital medium , since now it will be their responsibility to rely on more or less reliable means and select the news that best reflect the reality of what it is happening.
In many countries such as the social network does not have its system of trends, so all these problems seem to be more distant. In any case, it is only a matter of time before this function ends up reaching everyone, and it is better that when this happens they do it well. And in that direction they seem to be walking, since ten days ago Facebook began to prepare the arrival of its fake news filter to its German version.