Facebook has planned an extension of the News tab, which basically says that countries apart from the US will be getting this feature. Facebook’s announcement has, however, been ambiguous because the social media site has not mentioned as to when it will launch this feature for other countries.
The countries that should possibly be receiving this extended News tab are UK, Germany, France, India and Brazil. Within a year or less, this extension should be available for the countries mentioned above. However, all of this could also just be speculation because of an important point which concerns platforms to ensure they pay the news outlets for the services they provide.
Facebook also mentioned that it might be working with these platforms, which are present in each of these mentioned countries, as the requirement for news and news reading habits vary from country to country. So, specifically meeting these needs would be imperative for the company.
In a Press Release, Facebook mentioned, “The US launch of Facebook News marked a new chapter in our relationship with the news industry and it’s off to a strong start. Built with publisher feedback and insights from people, it is a personalized destination for news on Facebook. Helping publishers reach new audiences has been one of our most important goals, and we’ve found over 95% of the traffic Facebook News delivers to publishers is incremental to the traffic they already get from News Feed.” As Facebook has mentioned that it shall be working with partners of different countries, it also has certain requirements which the partner platforms need to meet.
Publishers of news in all these countries will have to pass the integrity standards and should also be catering to a large number of readers. Facebook will check the authenticity of these partner platforms with the help of third-party fact-checkers. Apart from this, violating copyright is a big red flag, along with sensationalism.
You might have noticed that out of the mentioned countries, Australia is missing. This is because Australia has asked tech platforms to pay for the news content. France, too, has asked Google to pay for the content that Google uses from French news publishers. Both Australia and France could be coming in later in the list to receive the extension of the News tab on Facebook.
The concept of a News Feed on Facebook has definitely threatened the publishing industry as a whole, especially for locally operating news publishers. Now, it is to be seen when Facebook finally decides to roll out this extended News tab feature as it has not clearly mentioned anything about the same yet.