On behalf of Meta, the German Pesse Agency (dpa) will take over the curation of Facebook News from April 1, 2022. As part of this collaboration, a team of journalists from dpa will support Facebook News in the selection of content.
Jesper Doub announced the future cooperation between dpa and Facebook in a blog post on Wednesday. Doub acts as Director of European News Partnerships at Facebook. The dpa also confirmed the upcoming partnership. The contractual partner is the dpa subsidiary dpa-Infocom GmbH.
According to the dpa press release, the board of the dpa management Peter Kropsch is pleased that “[…] be able to provide Facebook News with a service in the future for which dpa is predestined as a joint venture of the German media.”
Furthermore, he is of the opinion that the dpa, as an independent news agency owned by the media, has all the characteristics required by this order. Neutrality and the up-to-the-second overview of the global news situation are two of them.
Editorial staff curated exclusively Facebook News
Frank Rumpf, Managing Director of dpa-Infocom, and Christian Röwekamp, Head of the dpa Editorial Board, will lead the dpa editorial team. The editors will only take care of curating Facebook News.
Facebook emphasizes that the news is selected according to journalistic criteria. At the same time, the selection of news follows the guidelines set by Meta. However, the dpa team is additionally supervised by a meta curation team.
dpa replaces Axel Springer offshoot Upday
Since May 2021, Meta Platforms has been offering its users journalistic content via the social media platform Facebook, which was previously curated by the Axel Springer offshoot Upday.
Facebook News is an area within the Facebook app that provides users with a mix of curated and personalized messages. The offer is intended to provide people with informative, reliable and relevant information.
The content is a mix of the most important current news and suggestions, which are tailored to the personal interests of the users. The selection is based on which messages the users read, share and subscribe.
dpa helps Facebook in the fight against misinformation
For several years, Facebook has been part of the current reporting on the topic of “fake news”. Again and again, the social media platform is accused of doing too little against misinformation and hate speech.
Since March 2019, dpa has been an external partner of Facebook’s fact-checking program in Germany. The program aims to reduce the spread of misinformation on the platforms operated by Meta.
As early as December 2021, dpa and WhatsApp jointly launched a fact-checking channel via the WhatsApp Business API. This is intended to give users the opportunity to easily check and identify misinformation.
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