Facebook survey for gathering information on the trustworthiness of news sources leaks out, and it's a surprisingly short one

In its ongoing battle against fake news, Facebook has introduced a new weapon, a survey that aims to filter out the fake from the real. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had mentioned the survey in a post last week, but it’s only now that we can see the questions that make up the survey. In his post, Zuckerberg stated that the aim of the survey was to determine sources that are “broadly trusted”. The idea here is that a source that is accepted by the larger community as trusted will be more reliable and “trustworthy” than a source that’s only trusted by a small community or group of people. The main problem with fake news on Facebook so far has been how Facebook feeds people the news. You get more content of the type you “like” than from those you don’t “like”. This creates a feedback loop that can reinforce one’s “trust” in one’s favourite sources, for better or worse. With the results of the survey, Zuckerberg thinks that they can fine-tune the Facebook News Feed to give you more relevant and trusted news than before. [caption id=“attachment_4158127” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Facebook. Reuters.[/caption] In a Buzzfeed News report, Facebook’s survey questions were published, and this has been confirmed by a Facebook spokesperson. These survey questions are basically a set of two questions which Facebook itself created. These questions are as follows: -Do you recognize the following website? Yes or No -How much do you trust each of these domains? Entirely A lot Somewhat Barely Not at all While the first question is objective, the other is left to the judgement of the reader, which on the surface, is certainly problematic. The reader’s judgement when it comes to “trusting” a new source might be determined by a user’s ideological preference. If one is a fan of Donald Trump, one is more likely to believe what Trump is saying, whether true or not. However, the survey questions are in line with Zuckerberg’s intentions. The only point of the survey is to determine what people think of a site. That’s all. The data will be used to determine a pattern of trustworthiness for a source and thus, determine the sources that are more likely to be trustworthy.

One concern with this method is that smaller and newer publishers might simply be left out and have no way of making their presence felt. Of course, this is just another trial by Facebook and the social media giant hasn’t revealed exactly how the data will be used. Either way, with no adequate oversight, it certainly does seem that Facebook is still master of our fates, and that should be more worrying than anything else.