Facebook to prioritise ’trustworthy’ news based on surveys

Facebook said that ranking by trustworthiness was not intended to directly impact any specific groups of publishers based on their size or ideology.

Zuckerberg said he settled on the idea of surveying Facebook users after rejecting having the company itself rank news outlets' trustworthiness.

"We decided that having the community determine which sources are broadly trusted would be most objective," he wrote in his post.

Facebook said it did not plan to release the survey results because they will represent an incomplete picture of how a story's position in a person's feed is determined.

Many factors determine where a post appears in a Facebook user's News Feed such as subject of the post, who wrote it and who is commenting on it.

Last week, Zuckerberg said the company would change the way it filters posts and videos on News Feed to prioritise what friends and family share.

News Corp , owner of the New York Post and other outlets, responded to the earlier Facebook announcement with a pledge to look for "any signs that the weighting of news sites is politically motivated."

The Rupert Murdoch-led company had no immediate comment on Friday.