Facebook changing the way it treats political news stories
Washington — A top Facebook executive said Tuesday the company’s strategy to distinguish between journalism and political content will go into effect in the "coming days". Facebook’s head of global news partnerships, Campbell Brown, said in an updated blog post that the social media giant would divide its political ads archive into two sections — one for ads promoting news stories about politics and one for ads promoting political candidates and issues. The new approach follows weeks of criticism from publishers who argued that Facebook’s decision to categorise promotion of their news articles as political content would serve to further confuse readers about what is fact and what is opinion. The announcement is the latest step by the Menlo Park, California-based company to combat manipulation of its platform in the wake of revelations that Russian operatives spread misinformation on the site to influence the 2016 US presidential election. Under Facebook’s political transparency rule...
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