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Facebook wants to provide their audience with a verified news section

In an effort to combat “Fake News” and misinformation spread via social media, Facebook is test-launching a news section. Facebook says it created the feature with the help of professional journalists.

“Journalism plays a critical role in our democracy. When news is deeply-reported and well-sourced it gives people information they can rely on. When it’s not, we lose an essential tool for making good decisions,” Facebook said in a press release. “People want and benefit from personalized experiences on Facebook, but we know there is reporting that transcends individual experience. We want to support both. Today we’re starting to test Facebook News, a dedicated place for news on Facebook, to a subset of people in the US.”

Facebook is testing the feature, starting with about 1,000 users. Facebook will be working with a team of journalists to select the day’s top stories. Users can sort articles by topic, choosing their preferred publications and filtering out publishers and sources they don’t want to read. But Facebook is already warning that their algorithms are imperfect.

“When we started talking to news organizations about building Facebook News earlier this year, they emphasized that original reporting is more expensive to produce and better recognized by seasoned journalists than by algorithms,” Facebook said. “So to help reward this kind of work, we formed a curation team to manage the Today’s Stories section of Facebook News. The team will have editorial independence and will select stories based on publicly available guidelines, which you can learn about at facebook.com/news.”