Facebook is owning up to its role in the media and press as being a major information mover by officially introducing The Facebook Journalism Project. According to its blog, the social media giant aims at collaborating with journalists and educators to provide the tools and establish products for providing more accurate news content through this platform.
The announcement was made on Wednesday, according to a report by The New York Times. The report mentions that Facebook will be developing training programs and tools for journalists and teach them how to better direct and establish the truth to a certain piece of information and report it on a site. Facebook also wants to train the public from citing fake news from the originals. The company was recently under the scanner for allegedly having fake news being posted on their news tab. By this move, it seems like Facebook doesn’t want to make any more slip ups.
There is no denying the fact that Facebook wants to deepen their ties with publishers and be a major name in the news business – a very unlikely avenue for Facebook to be crossing. In fact, it’s quite unexpected that Facebook would end up being such a force for providing information. The fact Zuckerberg had personally acknowledged that Facebook is now much more than social platform, but also a news machine, that there’s a certain responsibility to maintain of how the news reaches its viewers.
Let’s not get confused though. Facebook isn’t going to be a journalism outlet. It’s simply going to be hiring engineers to create tech that’s more journalism friendly. Facebook is planning to start its own subscription network within the Facebook app as an experiment for its users and give them a free trial so they can follow their favourite news networks.
Facebook has said that it’ll let users follow the local news and also give independent news outlets an opportunity to publish to its residents, hopefully bridging communities closer together. Not everything has been set in stone as to how Facebook is looking to go ahead with these initiatives, but there is a plan in place for everything, and Facebook is letting everyone know that they’re doing something about the problem of misinformation.
With Facebook Live, anyone can be a journalist today. Fidji Simo, who is the Director of Product at Facebook is motivated by this cause and has also acknowledged that they are going over what their role is in the ecosystem of news generation media.
COMMENTS