Facebook on Friday announced that it was launching a section of the social media platform dedicated to news.
The “Facebook News” feature will be a collection of personalized news stories. It will also have a section of stories that are chosen by a team of journalists and topic sections. The feature will allow users to hide articles, topics, and publishers they don’t want to see.
“Today we’re starting to test Facebook News, a dedicated place for news on Facebook, to a subset of people in the US. News gives people more control over the stories they see, and the ability to explore a wider range of their news interests, directly within the Facebook app.” Campbell Brown, Facebook’s vice president of global news partnerships and Mona Sarantakos, the company’s product manager for news, said in a statement. “It also highlights the most relevant national stories of the day. News articles will continue to appear in News Feed as they do today.”
Publishers featured in the new section will need to be part of the company’s “News Page Index” and will be vetted for a number of things including “integrity,” the company said.
The new section comes as Facebook has faced criticism for disinformation being shared on the platform in the run up to the 2016 presidential election.
Earlier this week the social media giant said it would soon begin placing “false information” labels on posts on Instagram, which it owns, to try and stop the spread of misinformation.
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