Facebook rolls out locally-focused News Feed globally
Facebook is constantly messing about with its News Feed, and it's only a matter of weeks since the social network said it was going to prioritize local news. Initially, this was only the case in the US, but now the change is rolling out around the globe.
The company says that "people around the world will see more news on Facebook from local sources covering their current city and other cities they may care about." Unfortunately for Facebook, however, it's unlikely to serve as too much of a distraction from the call/SMS logging controversy or the Cambridge Analytica debacle.
See also:
- Facebook's latest News Feed update gives local news a boost
- Privacy: Facebook has been collecting call and text data from Android users
- Facebook suspends Trump campaign's data analytics team, Cambridge Analytica, for harvesting private information of 50 million users
- Mozilla launches a petition asking Facebook to do more for user privacy
Facebook reiterates what it said when the local news option appeared in the US -- that it gives people a way to easily see the news that directly affects them and their community, as well as making it easier to see what's going on in the local area. Rather than limiting the feature to just a few countries, it is now available in all countries, and all languages.
The social network says:
With this update, we're helping local publishers who cover multiple, nearby cities reach audiences in those cities. We'll 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, we're including other cities that people may care about and connecting people to local publishers from those cities.
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