In its bid to increase the quality of news on its platform, and to help people connect to their communities, Facebook is expanding its prioritisation of local news beyond the United States. The update is now global, and available in all languages.
Earlier this year, after announcing arguably the biggest News Feed change since New Feed came into existence, Facebook also announced that it would also be making a small change in the to prioritise local news. “Local news helps people connect to their communities,” and we all know how Facebook feels about communities. Now, a few months after making the update in the US, the company announced that it is expanding the update “to people in all countries, in all languages.” What does this mean for Facebook users? Well, they will get to see more news on the platform from local news sources that cover the city they live in and “other cities they care about.”
In its bid to increase the quality of news in News Feed, Facebook will prioritise news from sources that people trust, and that is both informative and relevant to local communities. What that means for local publishers, is that Facebook will help them reach their audiences more effectively in the cities in which they operate and the surrounding ones.
A publisher will be considered local to specific cities if people in them are more likely to read stories from its domain. In the announcement of the expansion, Alex Hardiman, Head of News Product, and Campbell Brown, Head of News Partnerships at Facebook, explain that “by expanding the scope of what may be considered local to people, [Facebook will be] including other cities that people may care about and connecting people to local publishers from those cities.”
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