Facebook to prioritize original reporting in feed

Facebook announced Tuesday that it will begin prioritizing original reporting in its news feed.

In a blog post, two senior employees explained that the platform will use artificial intelligence to determine which articles on a particular issue are most often cited as the original source.

Facebook will also demote content lacking transparent info about editorial staff of the publisher.

This change would theoretically decrease the reach of clickbait sites that just repost articles from other publications.

Tuesday’s blog post stressed that the changes will not dramatically change the feed.

“We anticipate most news publishers won’t see significant changes to their distribution in News Feed as a result of these updates,” Campbell Brown, vice president of Global News Partnerships, and Jon Levin, product manager, said.

This is the latest tweak Facebook has made to its algorithms, which critics say boosts misinformation.

Last week, Facebook launched a feature to warn users if they’re about to share a news article that is more than 90 days old.

It also committed to flagging political speech that violates platform policies, an about-face after more than a hundred companies announced they would be pulling their ads from Facebook for at least the month of July.