SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook on Tuesday said it will give priority to original news reporting as part of an effort to divert attention from spam, click bait and specious articles.

The world’s leading social network said it will also downplay news stories that lack bylines that can be checked or from publishers that don’t clearly share information about their staff.

“We’ve found that publishers who do not include this information often lack credibility to readers and produce content with clickbait or ad farms, all content people tell us they don’t want to see on Facebook,” Campbell Brown, Facebook’s vice president for global news partnerships, and product manager Jon Levin said in a blog post.

The moves come as Facebook tries to diffuse an advertiser boycott that has morphed into a global digital activist campaign aimed at curbing hateful and toxic content on the social media giant.

Published in Dawn, July 1st, 2020