SnarkyCopFacebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced on Friday that they would be making more changes to how the Facebook news feeds work, and it looks like those changes will involve throttling pro-police news.
Zuckerberg explained that as a move to reduce the spread of fake news on Facebook, they would be cutting distribution to news sources that rank low in an algorithm which will be based on customer surveys.
He explained:
Here’s how this will work. As part of our ongoing quality surveys, we will now ask people whether they’re familiar with a news source and, if so, whether they trust that source. The idea is that some news organizations are only trusted by their readers or watchers, and others are broadly trusted across society even by those who don’t follow them directly.
This is exactly like telling users, “Because you aren’t smart enough to figure out what content is real, we’re going to ask you what content you think is real.” Their solution doesn’t make any sense until you consider that they already know how people are going to respond.
All partisan content will presumably be affected negatively by surveys. Blue Lives Matter will be voted against by anti-police crowds, and anti-police content will be voted against by pro-police people. Conservative content will be voted against, and liberal content will be voted against. Each side will downvote an opposing side until the last news sources left standing are sources with the least appearance of bias: newspapers and local broadcast news.
Facebook has been courting local news for a while now, and it seems clear that they’ve already picked them as the winners. The surveys are just a way for Facebook to claim that they don’t have responsibility for making the decision.
It’s not clear at this point what the change will mean for Blue Lives Matter. We started our website to counter the misleading, if not outright false, information coming from mainstream media. We couldn’t stand seeing Michael Brown continually be referred to as an “unarmed black teen shot by a white police officer” with no mention of the fact that Brown was actively trying to murder that officer after committing a robbery.
Facebook wants to control what news you see, and it’s not the sort of news that’s fair to police officers.
But you can take action to counter Facebook’s changes. Here’s how:
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Tell Facebook you want to see Blue Lives Matter first on your newsfeed. You can do this on the mobile Facebook app by going to the menu button in the upper right, then scrolling down to “News Feed Preferences.”
Then click on “Prioritize Who To See First” and select Blue Lives Matter.
On desktop, you can select who you see first by clicking the dropdown arrow in the upper-right and clicking on news feed preferences from there.
3) The next thing you can do is to like/comment/share an article after you read it. This will tell Facebook to show our content to more people and counteract anti-police people flagging the page.
- Even if you follow us, Facebook may still not show you all of our articles, so the best thing you can do is come to our site directly each day. Blue Lives Matter’s Website has the best criminal justice news on the internet. Visit each day so you don’t miss out.
Please help spread the word about what Facebook is doing to not just pro-police sites, but all sites with an opposing political opinion. Thank you for your support.