Social-Media
Facebook plans to expand its news tab outside the United States
Facebook plans to expand its news section to the "consider" potential beneficiaries, it announced on Tuesday in the UK, France, India and Brazil. "In the next six months to a year," the company's timeline is vague, and so Facebook would announce something that is still not imminent. However, given the volatile history of Facebook with the news industry and the trend towards platforms for paying for news outlets, the company can only test its waters in the next step.
In June Facebook started its News Register for US audiences with plans to pay publishers.
For Facebook to be partner, publishers needed to comply with their standards of integrity and to have a sufficient audience. He said he would rely on fact-checkers from third parties to monitor posts for clickbait, copyright violations and awesome content.
Australia, which recently revealed plans to force tech platforms to help pay for the free content that they spread, has not been included in the list of potential countries that would be next on the news tab. In April, the French authorities ordered Google to pay for content from French publishers, which appears in the Facebook list with possible future news targets.
The vice president of global news partner Campbell Brown says in Tuesday's announcement that the news content could vary across countries in order to stay on track. To tailor the experience and test methods for delivering a valuable human experience while also honoring editorial business models, we will work closely with news partners in each country, Brown wrote.
There are many grounds to be cautious about Facebook's efforts, both for news publishers in the US and elsewhere. Their News Feed and ad business algorithms have proved devastating for the industry , especially local news publishers.
And its news track is marked by failures, such as the infamous early and mid-2010's "swing to video" motion with publications spending resources on video production that seek to benefit from the video platform on Facebook.
However, "pivot to video," because it was turned out Facebook was juicy with metrics, was a phrase that means short-sighted failure. And of course the 2016 electoral cycle is a debacle that resulted, among allegations it favored the conservation media, in Facebook's removal of its Trending Themas section.
Six months or one year from now, the regulatory environment is everybody's guess for Facebook and other social media platforms and it may at least in the US rely on the result of the November presidential election. It appears that Facebook holds its cards near the chest until then.
