Tuesday, January 30, 2018

Facebook Adding Local News To Feeds

Mark Zuckerberg said Monday that Facebook will now start showing users more local news stories in their feeds — the latest in a string of reforms the company has announced this year.

“Local news helps build community — both on and offline,” Zuckerberg wrote in a post. “It's an important part of making sure the time we all spend on Facebook is valuable.”


Zuckerberg said local news stories shared by users or the news outlets themselves will show up higher in users’ feeds. The Facebook CEO suggested that promoting local news could lead to increased civic engagement and less polarization.

The move comes as Facebook is trying to appease critics who think the platform has been enabling the spread of misinformation, particularly in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election.

This month, Facebook has also said that it will soon begin prioritizing user content over posts from news outlets and other brands. It will also start ranking news publishers based on how much users trust them, prioritizing posts from outlets with high trust ratings.

Zuckerberg said the latest change is a response to what he heard from talking to people during his nationwide tour in 2017.

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