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Facebook is hiring actual human journalists to fight fake news

Allison Matyus
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Facebook is looking to hire journalists whose job will be to fight fake news on your news feed. 

The New York Times reports that the new initiative will be called News Tab. The social media giant said it plans to hire a team of journalists that will curate a dedicated news section within the mobile app. Facebook posted job listings for journalists on Tuesday, August 20. 

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“Our goal with News Tab is to provide a personalized, highly relevant experience for people,” Campbell Brown, the head of news partnerships at Facebook, told the Times. “To start, for the Top News section of the tab we’re pulling together a small team of journalists to ensure we’re highlighting the right stories.” 

The News Tab will exist outside of Facebook’s news feed and will contain the most recent and relevant news stories. The feature will reportedly be ready by the end of the year. 

Last year, Facebook introduced scholarships for those students looking to pursue a career in journalism, communications, and digital media as a way for the platform to solidify its stance against fake news. The Facebook Journalism Project Scholarship gave four diverse organizations $250,000 in grants to be used over five years and gives five aspiring journalists $10,000 each in scholarships per year. 

In the past, Facebook has been accused of perpetuating fake news on its news feed, so getting involved with actual journalists could be a step in the right direction to curb unreliable and biased news. 

Facebook’s efforts to fight fake news have a focus on limiting the ability of fake news stories (or clickbait) to go viral and providing easy ways for users to fact-check stories. Facebook also partnered with fact-checking organizations such as Snopes and PolitiFact. 

Still, fake news can spread like wildfire on the platform, as seen with the recent announcement of the removal of China-linked Facebook accounts, pages, and groups. These now removed accounts posed as news organizations to discredit the protests going on in Hong Kong. 

This year alone, Facebook has released 10 announcements about the removal of groups, accounts, and pages for “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” which is Facebook’s term for “when groups of pages or people work together to mislead others about who they are or what they are doing.” 

Facebook will join other tech giants like Apple and LinkedIn in creating its own space within the world of publishing. Apple hired journalists to curate its Apple News feature, and LinkedIn has in-house journalists that work on its editorial products. 

Digital Trends reached out to Facebook for more information on the News Tab feature, but we have yet to hear back. 

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Allison Matyus
Allison Matyus
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Allison Matyus is a general news reporter at Digital Trends. She covers any and all tech news, including issues around social…
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