When news spread that parts of the planet were in for a ‘Super Blue Blood Moon’ sighting earlier this week, the social media feeds, like Facebook, were buzzing with chatter. Some brands and other Pages jumped on board to celebrate this spectacular lunar event where a lunar eclipse, blood moon, and supermoon are all combined.
Facebook and Fake News
One such little-known Page called EBUZZ racked up 16 million views for supposedly a ‘live feed’ of the supermoon casting over the Temple of Poseidon in southern Greece. However, what was this feed really? It was just a continual broadcast of a still image overlaid with nature sound effects.
In other words, while Facebook has made several major announcements in 2018 about its efforts to curb inauthentic Page content, this largely inactive Page was earning views in the millions for what was essentially fake content. The last post made on the EBUZZ page was in September 2017 and the photo used for the ‘live stream’ actually belongs to photographer Chris Kotsiopoulos. The stream remained active for roughly four hours before Facebook removed it.
Source: CNN
The Facebook Algorithms
For context, Facebook tallies views according to the number of users who watch a video for at least three seconds, either directly on the Page or what appears in their News Feeds. That 16 million users engaged with the content long enough for the video to reach that metric, raises questions about the strength and veracity of recent efforts announced by Facebook.
What Facebook Says
In January, the social channel committed to curbing the amount of Page content in users’ News Feeds. Greater emphasis is to be placed on content from personal networks instead, favouring local news content and completely banning cryptocurrency ad content. “As a result, you’ll see less public content, including news, video, and posts from brands. After this change, we expect news to make up roughly 4% of News Feed – down from roughly 5% today,” comments Mark Zuckerberg.
And on January 19, Zuckerberg also announced Facebook’s efforts to ensure that news items appearing on Facebook would only be from ‘trusted sources.’ “There’s too much sensationalism, misinformation, and polarization in the world today. Social media enables people to spread information faster than ever before, and if we don’t specifically tackle these problems, then we end up amplifying them.” Continues Zuckerberg.
Apparently, Facebook will ask their Community which news sources they trust and use this data to set up the checks and balances. According to Facebook News, publications deemed trustworthy by people using Facebook may see an increase in their distribution. Publications that do not score highly as trusted by the community may see a decrease. They have also released Publisher Guidelines.
What are your thoughts on the recent Facebook changes?
Original article on Hubspot