Facebook "High Quality" News Feed Tweak Will Be Mostly Source-Biased

Facebook announced changes to its News Feed on Monday, promising to increase the "quality" of news-related posts by tweaking the visibility of "relevant" posts. But Facebook's explanation of how it would accomplish this was rather nebulous, only giving an example of reducing the number of meme photos from third-party sites. Now, News Feed manager Lars Backstrom has revealed some details, and it sounds like Facebook's News Feed is taking a page from Google.

On Friday, Lars Backstrom got on the phone with AllThingsD's media mastermind Peter Kafka to clarify what changes were coming to the News Feeds of about 1 billion people on the internet, and how those changes could affect publishers, media companies, and users.

In its announcement, Facebook only said it would start sorting out high quality articles from meme photos: "Starting soon, we'll be doing a better job of distinguishing between a high quality article on a website versus a meme photo hosted somewhere other than Facebook when people click on those stories on mobile. This means that high quality articles you or others read may show up a bit more prominently in your News Feed, and meme photos may show up a bit less prominently."

This leaves a lot of questions unanswered, like is Facebook really that concerned with outside meme photos? It seems like it.

Backstrom told Kafka in so many words that, first off, the News Feed would value written content over a single picture. "... We went and asked people which of those things [memes vs. articles] they get more value from. We've run surveys, and asked people to rate stories and things. And they'll say, 'The cat photo was great, and I had a good chuckle, but of those two, the second one [an AllThingsD article] enriched my life more, and I got more value out of it.'" Backstrom said Facebook wanted to stop treating everything that gets a click the same, when the content is vastly different, but it sounds as if Facebook is simply trying to boost its media cred with this move.

And then there's the source bias. Facebook, according to Backstrom, will identify "high quality" posts mostly by identifying the source of an article - at least "for right now," he said. Backstrom said the change wasn't directed at any kind of media in particular, and would be based on algorithmic changes to provide better "user value," though he did not go into details about what that entails.

Identifying quality at the source is an easier way to identify high quality articles than trying to build algorithms that take into account aspects of articles like writing quality, originality, and depth. And it means that articles from well-known news sources will be featured more prominently on Facebook News Feeds than articles from smaller, newer, or lesser-known publishers, no matter the depth or quality (or lack thereof) of the individual article. With this (possibly temporary) source bias, Facebook is running into some of the same problems Google has faced since it updated its page rank system in 2011 to reduce the number of spam articles featured in search returns.

Simply put, an article from one of the "big guys" will now get more exposure on Facebook, only because of its source - even if it's a two-paragraph jot-down written by an intern.

Backstrom emphasized that the change is slight - like a 10 percent shift in the content of an average user's News Feed. But for a company with 1 billion users, any 10 percent change can have a big impact.