Facebook recruits reporters to manage its news tab



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The Facebook logo is posted at the F8 Facebook Developer Conference on April 30, 2019 in San Jose, California.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

Facebook confirmed Tuesday that he was hiring a team of seasoned journalists to help write articles in his current affairs column that will be launched soon.

The company confirmed the plans after the New York Times announced that Facebook was inviting human curators instead of relying solely on algorithms to determine the stories its users saw.

A small team of editors will be in charge of selecting the most relevant national news of the day. The content will appear in the news section at the top of the tab, a new feature scheduled to launch this fall.

The team will keep up with the latest news and articles, but will not be responsible for other editorial tasks, such as writing titles, stories or content writing, the company said.

The other contents of the News tab will mainly appear via an algorithmic selection. Facebook said it would look at user controls, the pages users follow, the publishers they subscribe to, and the news they interact with, indicating what types of news items are personalized. will show in the "News" tab.

"Our goal with the" News "tab is to provide a personalized and highly relevant experience to people," said Campbell Brown, head of news partnerships on Facebook, in a statement. "The majority of the stories that people will see will appear in the tab via an algorithmic selection."

"For starters, for the Top News section of the tab, we are bringing together a small team of journalists to make sure we bring out the good reports," she said.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the social media giant has approached several media outlets, including the Washington Post and Bloomberg, to pay them up to $ 3 million a year in content licenses.

Facebook pointed out that the news tab was not a reincarnation of the news section of the now-extinct company, presenting topical topics, ranking news topics and links in according to their popularity.

The feature has attracted attention after controversial links and fake headlines have made their way into the section. In 2016, an article by Gizmodo alleged that independent contractors hired to moderate the section often repressed conservative stories and those on Facebook itself.

Last Tuesday, an interim report led by the GOP analyzing allegations of liberal bias on the platform said that Facebook still had a lot of work to do to win the trust of conservative users.

The news tab marks Facebook's latest efforts to tackle information corruption and to fight the spread of misinformation on its site The company is under pressure to limit false information on the website. platform since the presidential election of 2016, during which foreign actors have used the site to sow division around social issues.

Facebook is not the only technology company to rely more and more on professionals to determine the information that its users see. Apple has assembled a team of former journalists to help select some of the information published in Apple News, while LinkedIn has also hired editors to manage the content of the site.

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