San Francisco (AFP)
Facebook has announced that it will broadcast articles from newspapers News Group newsgroup, belonging to the Murdoch family, in its future section "news", without however specify how they will be paid.
Edited by experienced journalists, the "news" tab will be separated from the classic Facebook thread showing posts from users' friends, according to Facebook, which is moving away from its habit of letting the algorithms alone direct the experience of its users.
The social network to 2.4 billion monthly users intends to launch its new service in the coming weeks, first in the United States.
"I am delighted that we have the opportunity to add the award-winning journalism of the Wall Street Journal - and other US News Corp titles - to our news section," Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement today. .
No details have been provided on how News Corp could be paid. Last month, a spokesman for Facebook said the social network intended to pay "a subset of publications that can regularly provide a certain amount of original content, based on facts."
According to a Wall Street Journal article in September, Facebook plans to pay a quarter of the 200 publications that should appear in its new tab.
Facebook and Google have become sources of information for their billions of users and dominate the global advertising market, while historical publications, whose traditional recipes (piece sales, non-digital advertising) have collapsed, are struggling to most to generate income online.
Facebook has also been heavily criticized in recent years because of the spread of "fake news" and a lack of protection of personal data of its users.
News Corp CEO Robert Thomson was pleased that Zuckerberg seems determined "to see that high-quality journalism has a viable future."
A team of journalists at Facebook will be responsible for selecting the headlines and main articles reproduced in the news tab, while algorithms will determine what other content will be highlighted for each user of the social network, according to "signals" such as favorite pages, subscriptions to publications or interactions with news sites.
© 2019 AFP