Facebook tweaked the News Feed to highlight more mainstream news sources for the election

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Facebook, in the days after the US election, decided that an uptick in viral misinformation related to election results and President Donald Trump’s refusal to concede needed an extreme measure to be dealt with. So the company made a temporary change to its News Feed algorithm to favor mainstream news outlets, according to a report from The New York Times published on Tuesday.

Facebook specifically tweaked how much weight the News Feed gives to “news ecosystem quality” scores, an internet metric designed to quantify the trustworthiness and quality of a news source. That way, users of Facebook would see more news from publishers like The New York Times, CNN, and NPR and less of the hyper-partisan pages that tend to peddle in inflammatory...