Facebook has been broadening its horizons for a while now, and this involves offering more services to its users in order to give them more of a reason to stick around on the platform and see what is being offered. The main purpose of these updates and new features basically has to do with maintaining relevance in a modern age where competition is rife within the industry and pretty much every social media app is vying for the attention of consumers that are rapidly becoming jaded by the plethora of options that are available to them.
One new feature that Facebook has been working on is a separate tab that would be dedicated to news. We have seen this on social media apps before. Reddit has had a news tab for quite some time now, and Google search has a separate news tab as well so that you can search through published news articles by using a keyword of some sort that would make it easier for you to get to the story that you need.
While Facebook’s news tab is definitely going to increase competition, along with making it apparent that the social media giant is going to be taking at least some responsibility for the fact that so much fake news is spread on its platform by regulating the news and making it official, a lot of experts are criticizing the fact that only a quarter of the news organizations whose content will be posted on the tab are going to be paid for these stories.
Photo: REUTERS/Dado Ruvic
Read next: Offensive Content will not be completely removed from Facebook but the Content Moderators will be taken care of
One new feature that Facebook has been working on is a separate tab that would be dedicated to news. We have seen this on social media apps before. Reddit has had a news tab for quite some time now, and Google search has a separate news tab as well so that you can search through published news articles by using a keyword of some sort that would make it easier for you to get to the story that you need.
While Facebook’s news tab is definitely going to increase competition, along with making it apparent that the social media giant is going to be taking at least some responsibility for the fact that so much fake news is spread on its platform by regulating the news and making it official, a lot of experts are criticizing the fact that only a quarter of the news organizations whose content will be posted on the tab are going to be paid for these stories.
"A person familiar with the matter said Facebook had never planned to pay all the news outlets whose content it would link to in its news section. The plan is similar to what Facebook has done with its Watch section, which includes videos not paid for by Facebook, the person said. Taking into account companies that own multiple publications, Facebook will pay fees to about one-quarter of the organizations that will be involved at launch, the person said.", revealed WSJ.This is a trend that is worryingly common among tech industries and shows a blatant disregard for the creators that are making the content that these corporations are profiting off of, and Facebook will need to address this if it wants the news tab to end up working out.
Photo: REUTERS/Dado Ruvic
Read next: Offensive Content will not be completely removed from Facebook but the Content Moderators will be taken care of
