The new trust rankings will emerge from surveys the company is conducting. “Broadly trusted” outlets that are affirmed by a significant cross-section of users may see a boost in readership, while less known organizations or start-ups receiving poor ratings could see their web traffic decline significantly on the social network. The company’s changes include an effort to boost the content of local news outlets, which have suffered sizable subscription and readership declines as news consumption migrated online.
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Daniel Kreiss, a professor at the school of media and journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said Facebook was now “offloading” its responsibilities for accuracy and quality onto its users. “Just by putting things out to a vote in terms of what the community would find trustworthy undermines the role for any serious institutionalized process to determine what’s quality and what’s not,” he said.
Source: Facebook will now ask users to rank news organizations they trust – The Washington Post