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In the tense days after the presidential election, a team of Facebook employees presented the chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, with an alarming finding: Election-related misinformation was going viral on the site.
President Donald Trump was already casting the election as rigged, and stories from right-wing media outlets with false and misleading claims about discarded ballots, miscounted votes and skewed tallies were among the most popular news stories on the platform.
In response, the employees proposed an emergency change to the site’s news feed algorithm, which helps determine what more than 2 billion people see every day. It involved emphasizing the importance of what Facebook calls “news ecosystem quality” scores, or NEQ, a secret internal ranking it assigns to news publishers based on signals about the quality of their journalism.
Typically, NEQ scores play a minor role in determining what appears on users’ feeds. But several days after the election,
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Zuckerberg agreed to increase the weight that Facebook’s algorithm gave to NEQ scores to make sure authoritative news appeared more prominently, said three people with knowledge of the decision, who were not authorized to discuss internal deliberations.
The change was part of the “break glass” plans Facebook had spent months developing for the aftermath of a contested election. It resulted in a spike in visibility for big, mainstream publishers like CNN, The New York Times and NPR, while posts from highly engaged hyperpartisan pages, such as Breitbart and Occupy Democrats, became less visible, the employees said.
It was a vision of what a calmer, less divisive Facebook might look like. Some employees argued the change should become permanent, even if it was unclear how that might affect the buy facebook comments of time people spent on Facebook. In an employee meeting the week after the election, workers asked whether the “nicer news feed” could stay, said two people who attended.
Guy Rosen, a Facebook executive who oversees the integrity division that is in charge of cleaning up the platform, said on a call with reporters last week that the changes were always meant to be temporary.
“There has never been a plan to make these permanent,” he said.
John Hegeman, who oversees the news feed, said that while Facebook might roll back these experiments, it would study and learn from them.
