This past April, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, assured that the platform was working on developing a section solely for news. This idea stems from Facebook Watch, a section where users can watch videos that don’t appear on their News Feed. This is part of Facebook has exponentially grown since its launch, and it’s no surprise that Zuckerberg would want to take advantage of this growth and launch something similar just for news.
According to reports from The Wall Street Journal, Facebook has approached communication platforms to offer them space in the new news section that will be launched by the end of the year. Rumors are stating that Facebook executives are willing to pay these media platforms 3 million dollars for a one year license to publish articles.
This initiative stems from Facebook Trending News, a feature that was launched last year where news and posts would appear on your feed. Since 2016, this feature has caused controversy.
First, it caused controversy because Facebook employees would manually amplify and prioritize certain news stories over others, causing people to question the company’s political agenda and its role as a “manipulator” in the media. To fight this problem, Facebook created an impartial algorithm and thus getting rid of the manual moderator. However, this didn’t produce optimal results since the algorithm would amplify and prioritize controversial and fake news.
With all of this in mind, Facebook decided to remove this feature from users’ feeds.
The demand for a news feature certainly exists, since almost half of Facebook users utilize the platform as a news source. The application could take advantage of this, it’s simply a matter of finding the right way to do so.
The idea is to launch a new section. Facebook could have certain control over content by using trusted and well-known sources. For this reason, the platform is looking to associate itself with established media platforms.
Knowing Facebook’s true motives to launch this section is a tricky matter. In a perfect world, Facebook simply wants to create business and make its platform into a necessary tool to live your life. Or maybe, there’s a possibility that Facebook wants to take control over the news and benefit from being able to influence popular opinion.
We’ll have to wait and see what plans Zuckerberg has for its platform. For now, we should just trust the fact that this new feature will help us stay informed.
Source: https://www.socialmediatoday.com