Facebook will change algorithm to reduce sensational content: Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook is also making a handful of other major changes to its content moderation efforts. First, decisions on content can be appealed to an independent body, taking the final decision out of Facebook’s hands.

Facebook will also start to make public the minutes of its meetings on content policy (REUTERS)

Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said the company is taking more drastic measures to reduce the spread of sensational content on its site -- by tweaking the news feed algorithm.

"People naturally engage with more sensational content," Zuckerberg said Thursday on a call with reporters. "What we see is that as content gets closer to the line of what is prohibited by our community standards, people seem to engage with it more." Facebook will now reduce distribution for that "borderline" content on the social network, Zuckerberg said.

The company is also making a handful of other major changes to its content moderation efforts. First, decisions on content can be appealed to an independent body, taking the final decision out of Facebook's hands.

In a Facebook post, Mark Zuckerberg further explained that the company is using artificial intelligence to proactively report potentially problematic content.

"This approach helps us identify and remove a much larger percent of the harmful content -- and we can often remove it faster, before anyone even sees it rather than waiting until it has been reported," he wrote.

"Moving from reactive to proactive handling of content at scale has only started to become possible recently because of advances in artificial intelligence -- and because of the multi-billion dollar annual investments we can now fund. To be clear, the state of the art in AI is still not sufficient to handle these challenges on its own. So we use computers for what they're good at -- making basic judgements on large amounts of content quickly -- and we rely on people for making more complex and nuanced judgements that require deeper expertise," Zuckerberg added.

(with inputs from HT Correspondent)