Facebook with a Big Change - Launches an Experimental News Content Section

Facebook launches an experimental news content section. Facebook News will only be available to some US users so far.

The social network wants to have a special place for people to read and organize news content. However, it will also appear in the main feed. The company's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, spoke about the idea during a discussion with Axel Springer SE CEO Mathias Döpfner in the summer.

The move comes years after Facebook has been quietly changing its algorithms and the order of its content. Its purpose was to prevent most readers from going to another site - including news sites. And most of them rely on visits for much of their revenue, and have repeatedly had to fund new work strategies in order to remain visible on the social network.

In the "News" section there will be a selection of the most important information of the day, made by journalists. Content will be selected by analogy to what the user monitors, shares and reads, but "new" topics will also be displayed. There will also be a division into topics such as "business", "entertainment", "health", "science and technology", "sports". Users will also be able to hide texts they are not interested in.

Facebook will select the media on whether it is included in its "News Page Index, which we developed in collaboration with the industry to identify news content." Publishers' whose content will be eligible to appear in its News tab will need to "abide by Facebook's Publisher Guidelines, these include a range of integrity signals in determining product eligibility, including misinformation - as identified based on third-party fact checkers - community standards violations (e.g., hate speech), clickbait, engagement bait and others."

Among the criteria are whether the...