After Facebook went public with the news feed change on Thursday, the website’s share value dropped by nearly four per cent before US markets opened on Friday.

By close of business on Friday Facebook shares were trading at $179.37, down more than 4.4 per cent on Thursday’s price of $187.77.

And Forbes has calculated that for Mr Zuckerberg, the co-founder, chairman and chief executive of Facebook, this translated into a personal hit of 3.3bn – a 4.4 per cent fall in his personal fortune.

Mr Zuckerberg, 33, who started Facebook in 2004 aged 19, still owns a 17 per stake in the company, which went public in 2012.

He explained his reasons for changing the news feed algorithm in a Facebook post on Thursday, saying he wanted the website to prioritise posts from friends and family over businesses and brands.

“We built Facebook to help people stay connected and bring us closer together with the people that matter to us,” he said.  “But recently we’ve gotten feedback that public content – posts from businesses, brands and media – is crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other.”

“Based on this,” he added, “I’m changing the goal I give our product teams from focusing on helping you find relevant content to helping you have more meaningful social interactions.”

Some, however, have suggested that the change might also have been influenced by Facebook’s alleged desire to counteract what the company is believed to refer to as “context collapse”.

This is the phenomenon where people stop sharing as much information about their personal lives on Facebook, yielding less useful data for the advertisers on whom Facebook relies to make its money.

Tweaking the news feed to encourage people to talk about their personal lives might, therefore, be seen as a means of increasing Facebook’s commercial value.

The markets, though, appear to have reacted badly to the news feed change, at least in the short term.

Some analysts, however, think the tweak will work well for the company in the long term.

Mark Mahaney, an analyst at RBC, told Bloomberg: “Making the feed more relevant should boost user and engagement growth over time.

“We believe these changes will be beneficial to Facebook in the medium and long term.”

Just how much Mr Zuckerberg will worry about the short term drop in his wealth is also unclear.

Given that Facebook shares were trading at around $127 (£92) a this time last year, the company’s value is still up by more than 40 per cent year-on-year, even after this week’s fall.

Despite losing $3.3bn, Mr Zuckerberg is still worth $72.4bn (£52.7bn).

In December 2015 Mr Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan said they were planning to give away 99 per cent of their Facebook shares down the line.

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Source: Independent

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Zuckerberg’s comment came during the opening of Facebook’s annual developers conference in the heart of Silicon Valley, where he focused on technology tools intended to promote stronger communities.

“We are going to work on building common ground, not just getting more opinions out there,” Zuckerberg said.

“Our hearts go out to the family and friends of Robert Godwin, Sr.. We will keep doing all we can to prevent tragedies like this from happening.”

He conceded that Facebook has “a lot of work” to do.

The US man wanted for killing Godwin in Ohio and then posting a video of the murder on Facebook fatally shot himself Tuesday after a brief pursuit in neighboring Pennsylvania, police said.

Steve Stephens, 37, had been the subject of a nationwide manhunt in the wake of Sunday’s killing in Cleveland.

The incident was the latest grisly crime posted on Facebook, reviving questions about videos posted on the world’s largest social network, and how — or if — they can be monitored. The footage was later taken down.

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Source: AFP

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In a post on his Facebook profile Mr Zuckerberg said he hoped to announce measures to tackle fake stories “soon”.

He said this work “often takes longer than we’d like in order to confirm changes we make won’t introduce unintended side effects or bias”.

And he said that more than 99% of content on Facebook “is authentic”.

“Only a very small amount is fake news and hoaxes. The hoaxes that do exist are not limited to one partisan view, or even to politics,” he added.

He said that made it extremely unlikely hoaxes “changed the outcome of the election in one direction or the other”.

‘Progress’

Mr Zuckerberg continued: “That said, we don’t want any hoaxes on Facebook. Our goal is to show people the content they will find most meaningful, and people want accurate news.

“We have already launched work enabling our community to flag hoaxes and fake news, and there is more we can do here. We have made progress, and we will continue to work on this to improve further.”

Some data has shown that fake stories were being far more widely shared on the platform than follow-up stories debunking the claims.

For an increasing number of people, particularly Americans, Facebook is becoming the primary source of news coverage.

The site’s News Feed is specifically designed to show users content it thinks will be of most interest, creating what some describe as a “filter bubble” that reinforces a person’s view without injecting differences in opinion.

Earlier this year, Facebook was accused of being anti-Trump after it was alleged its human moderators were favouring liberal stories appearing in people’s “trending stories” box.

While denying that claim, the site did sack its human team, instead relying solely on an algorithm to determine which stories were shown to be most popular.

‘Mainstream sources’

Mr Zuckerberg said any new changes to the way hoaxes and fake news were flagged up had to be taken with caution.

“This is an area where I believe we must proceed very carefully though,” he said.

“Identifying the ‘truth’ is complicated. While some hoaxes can be completely debunked, a greater amount of content, including from mainstream sources, often gets the basic idea right but some details wrong or omitted.

“An even greater volume of stories express an opinion that many will disagree with and flag as incorrect even when factual.

“I am confident we can find ways for our community to tell us what content is most meaningful, but I believe we must be extremely cautious about becoming arbiters of truth ourselves.”

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Source: BBC

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