Facebook Launches a News Tab on its Mobile Application

Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic where social platforms face growing scrutiny for handling of fake news, Facebook has just launched a revamped news tab for Facebook application users in the United States. This tab will feature journalism, particularly from a list of credible sources, and users will be permitted to sort the news according to their own preferences.

Facebook Launches a News Tab on its Mobile Application

According to Facebook, the firm has worked with different publishers and journalists to promote ‘integrity signals’, based on which, the credibility of a news piece is determined. The algorithm is developed to exclude publishers that share fake news.

Facebook also mentioned that algorithms and part human curators would partly determine the news tab. The topmost stories posted in the first section will be decided by journalists themselves.

In its only FAQ section, Facebook has demonstrated that to draw its editorial strategy and to determine which publishers to promote, the company is using a human team, which may result in more controversy. Furthermore, the social media platform has asked publishers and journalists to register themselves and ‘news pages’ with the help of this link. To pass as one of its partnered publishers, the applicants need to have a large enough audience and also pass the Facebook’s integrity standards.

However, the platform’s relationship with the news business is intensely complex and strained thanks to an array of high-profile controversies that came forward over the past years. Hence, it needs to be examined on how efficiently Facebook manages this new venture.

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