social media

Facebook Rolls Out New Feature

After deprioritizing news in the News Feed and pivoting to video, Facebook is officially back in the news business again.

The social media giant is rolling out Facebook News to select audiences in the US starting today, carving a dedicated home screen tab out of its digital real estate for users to explore their news interests directly within the Facebook app.

“Facebook News was built to bring people closer to the stories that affect their lives,” the company said. “We’ll continue to learn, listen and improve News as it rolls out more broadly.”

The company’s plans for a news service became concrete in CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony before the US Congress, during which he labelled News as “a big initiative around news and journalism where we’re partnering with a lot of folks to build a new product that’s supporting high-quality journalism.”

This is materializing as a partnership with a number of big publishers, including The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, Business Insider, and BuzzFeed. It’s also paying a handful of the big money — $3 million a year for three-year deals, according to Vox — for making their journalism available to Facebook.

To that effect, the Menlo Park tech firm is embracing a mix of human and AI-driven approach to curating news in an attempt to fix the problems created by News Feed.

A “diverse team of journalists” have been tasked with highlighting the biggest news stories of the day, while everything else will be hand-picked by an algorithm depending on your interests.

The company said as many as eight factors — facts, diverse voices, original reporting, on-the-record sourcing, timeliness, depth and context, fairness, and local reporting — will be taken into account when choosing specific stories across a breadth of topics ranging from politics and world affairs to entertainment and science.

Facebook clearly understands the dangers of algorithmic curation for serving personalized news, for it acknowledges that machine learning has its limits. Still, the company also expects algorithmic personalization to drive the majority of Facebook News.

A question of trust

Facebook has made several overtures with news publishers in the past, although none of it has worked well — neither for the company nor the publishers.

It started with Instant Articles in 2015, before it changed its mind by shifting to video the following year, and made an algorithmic tweak in early 2018 that reordered its News Feed to show more posts shared by friends and family and less from publishers.

And let’s not forget that the last time Facebook experimented with a separate tab for News, it not only led to traffic plummeting on news sites but also resulted in “a steady rise in engagement on sites that publish fake or sensationalist news,” prompting Facebook to abort the test.

As much as publishers have been subjected to the constant updates and tweaks in order to keep users glued to Facebook, they still seem keen to work with it again in part due to the service’s colossal reach, which could translate into a huge audience.

Given Facebook’s spotty track record with distributing news on its platform, it’s too early to call it dead on arrival. But with the company compensating for high-quality journalism, it will be interesting to see how this trial pans out in the long run.

At a time the company is facing a question of trust after what’s a string of scandals, its re-entry as a news aggregator should be seen for what it is: another attempt by Facebook to keep users locked into its ecosystem and not depart to its rivals like Snapchat and ByteDance-owned TikTok.

The only question that remains now is whether people are ready to get their daily news fix from the Big F.