Facebook will prioritize "trustworthy" news in its feed of social media posts, using member surveys to identify high-quality outlets and fight fake news.

Last week, the social network announced major changes to News Feed, including the limitation of showing public content - including news, video and posts - from brands.

The new changes focus on the quality of the posts.
During 2018, Facebook will prioritize news from publications that the community rates as trustworthy, people find informative
and is relevant to people's local community.

Starting next week, Facebook will begin tests in the first area: to prioritize news from publications that the community rates as trustworthy.

Facebook says it surveyed a diverse and representative sample of people using Facebook across the US to gauge their familiarity with, and trust in, various different sources of news. This data will help to inform ranking in News Feed.

Facebook will start with the US and plan to roll this out internationally in the future.

When Facebook ranks and make improvements to News Feed, the social network says it is relying on a set of "core values." One of Facebook's News Feed values is that the stories in your feed should be informative.

For "informative" sources, Facebook will continue to improve on the work the company first announced in August 2016, where it began asking people to rank the informativeness of updates in their feed on a scale of one to five.

Finally, Facebook is making it easier for people to see local news and information in a dedicated section.

For the first change in the US next week, Facebook says publications deemed trustworthy by people using Facebook may see an increase in their distribution. Publications that do not score highly as trusted by the community may see a decrease.

Zuckerberg said on Friday he expects recently announced changes to shrink the amount of news on Facebook by 20 percent, to about 4 percent of all content from 5 percent currently.

The move is likely to send shockwaves through the media landscape in nearly every country.

The quality of news on Facebook has been called into question after alleged Russian operatives, for-profit spammers and others spread false reports on the site, including during the 2016 U.S. election campaign.