Facebook rolls out a dedicated newsfeed that is entirely separate from personal news updates.
The section is called Facebook News, which is free from updates from friends, colleagues, and families as it is entirely dedicated to journalism. The Sun aims to easily track down actual news, apart from memes and casual rumors.
Testing on this new feature began in October last year but now rolls out to all users across the United States, while Facebook users worldwide will likely get access to it after the global launch. Finally, Facebook users can focus on reading the news.
"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," Facebook representative Campbell Brown said.
Brown also the features highlights the most relevant national stories of the day while regular news articles will continue to show in News Feed as they do today.
What's new in the Facebook News
The Facebook News section will be a special area that focuses on news that Facebook has picked for the user. A team of journalists would identify important news for the Today's Stories feature of Facebook News.
Also, stories will be personalized and automatically selected based on the news that users read, follow, and share. Topic Sections are added to allow users to research further into areas like entertainment, business, sports, health as well as science and tech.
Meanwhile, Your Subscriptions section is created for people who have linked their paid news subscriptions to their Facebook account. This includes online readings and publications. Similarly, users can also hide articles, topics, and publishers that they do not want to see.
Meanwhile, there is also a local news section, which helps people find stories about their area from smaller publications.
According to Facebook, the news is taken from various pages that are registered with the News Page Index. Publication pages that are still not yet registered can register their business instead. Also, only publishers that meet Facebook's criteria for inclusion can be included.
Facebook is also testing whether videos can be added to Facebook News. "We know the importance of video to our consumers and publishers, and will be working to launch video in Facebook News in 2020 fully," the Facebook News wrote in the FAQ.
Facebook has been criticized for not giving users news from a wide range of viewpoints. Now, the social media giant said its curators will have "editorial independence," and they may choose stories based on publicly available guidelines.
News from local and independent publishers and journalists, as well as major news organizations, will be included.
Meanwhile, in its "inauthentic behavior report" released last month, Facebook has removed two networks of accounts last month, which include pages and groups from Tunisia and the other one, which targeted audiences in the Kurdistan region of Iraq.
Also, the social media company removed a total of 253 Facebook accounts, 240 Instagram accounts, 770 Facebook pages, and 101 Facebook groups in its drive against misinformation last month.
