You know that thing we like to say to other people that you shouldn’t base all of your news and information from Facebook? Well, unfortunately, a lot of people still do read their news from the social network giant which has actually contributed to the proliferation of fake news. Worse, some actually just look at the headlines and not read the entire thing. Now in order to give people more (hopefully) “legitimate” sources of news, Facebook has rolled out a new Facebook News for users in the United States.
The Facebook News tab will start showing up for U.S. users and you’ll see different sections and features within it which they came up with after talking to people and publishers. Today’s Stories will help you catch up with the top stories and is curated by a team of journalists. Your feed will be personalized based on what you read, share, and follow so you’ll see things that actually interest you.
The feed will also have different topic sections in case you want to read more news about business, entertainment, health, science & tech, and sports. You will also have controls so you can hide articles, topics, and publishers that you have no interest in seeing. If you already have paid new subscriptions, you can also link them to your Facebook account and read them through the Facebook News section. They say their team of curators is independent and there will no be internal editorial invention.
Facebook News will have four categories of publishers: general, topical, diverse, and local news. The publishers are chosen based on various criteria, including presence in their News Page Index and they will have to abide by the Publisher’s Guidelines which have several integrity signals which they have to pass (misinformation, clickbait, engagement bait, etc). Facebook says they will be conducting regular checks on the various pages’ integrity status.
In the first run of this Facebook News, they will also show local publications from the largest major metro areas including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington DC, Miami, etc. They are paying some of the participating publishers so that there will be a new revenue stream for some of them.
