Facebook has rolled out Facebook News, a dedicated tab on its platform for news stories.
The feature, only available to a select group in the US as part of a trial, will include news articles from trusted sources such as News Corp’s Wallstreet Journal and Fox News, along with The Washington Post, NPR, Buzzfeed, Politico and Bloomberg. Facebook will pay some publishers directly for their content.
The news tab is curated by human editors from the selected sources, which need to have a “sufficiently large audience” and be consistent with Facebook’s community guidelines which covers things such as hate speech and clickbait.
Some have welcomed the launch of Facebook News as an extra revenue stream, including News Corp CEO Robert Thomson who joined Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for a discussion on the launch of the news tab.
“The landscape itself must change and that was an imperative for us [News Corp] and that’s what makes the Facebook announcement so significant.” Thomson says.
“It’s a powerful precedent that will echo around editorial departments. It begins to change the terms of quality journalism, both in establishing the principle of payment and in allowing news organisations a clearer opportunity to generate advertising revenue on their terms.”
However, many have criticised the social media giant for including Breitbart as a source - a publication former chair Steve Bannon labelled “alt-right”.
The publication has been blacklisted by advertisers for its extreme views in the past.
Zuckerburg addressed the inclusion of Breitbart by saying the platform needs to have a diversity of views on the news tab.
“You want to have content that represents different perspectives but is doing so in ways that complies with the standards we have for this,” Zuckerberg says.
“Having someone eligible to show up is going to be different from what the curators and journalists who are picking the top stories necessarily choose as the most relevant thing to surface.
“So we‘re going to have to see a little bit how this plays out but I certainly think you want to include a breath of content in there to make sure all the different topics can be covered.”
Thomson followed Zuckerberg’s comments, saying “when we’re dealing with hypotheticals, and it’s the same for every media organisation particularly at this time of polarisation and provocation, we really need calm heads, clear heads, not exploding heads”.
Facebook is planning to rollout the news tab to international markets, however, it hasn’t yet selected markets.
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