Meet Facebook News: its new ‘dedicated place’ for news in the US

Facebook on Friday announced that it has begun testing a new “dedicated place” for news on its platform called Facebook 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,” the company explained on its website.

Facebook News will, in fact, feature news curated by journalists and news based on the content users interact with.

The platform will also feature a wide range of news categories like Business and Health, as well as a space for users to link their news subscriptions.

“We also aim to serve both people and news publishers, and not just the big national players,” Facebook further said, referring to machine learning woes of some publishers.

The company further revealed that it developed a “curation team” to manage the content that appears in News as well.

“The team will have editorial independence and will select stories based on publicly available guidelines,” the company said.

Facebook has recently been invested in weeding out false news from the platform, enabling fact-checking services in South Africa and other countries.

Currently, Facebook News is being tested in the United States.

News Feed, meanwhile, will remain on Facebook.

Feature image: Facebook