Facebook to Show More Local News to Newsfeeds Globally
Facebook has started prioritizing local news in all countries, in all languages.
Earlier this year, the company announced a change in the US to prioritize local news so people can see topics that have a direct impact on their community and discover what's happening in their local area. Today, the feature launches wordlwide.
With this update, Facebook says it is helping local publishers who cover multiple, nearby cities reach audiences in those cities. The company will consider a publisher as local to multiple cities if the people in those cities are more likely than the people outside of those cities to read articles from the publisher's domain. By expanding the scope of what may be considered local to people, Facebook is including other cities that people may care about and connecting people to local publishers from those cities.
Facebook promises to continue working on prioritizing high quality news in News Feed, including news from sources that are broadly trusted.
The changes come amid allegations that the British consultancy Cambridge Analytica improperly gained access to Facebook users' information to build profiles of American voters that were later used to help elect U.S. President Donald Trump in 2016.
Facebook also faces criticism that its algorithms may have prioritized misleading news in people's feeds.