Facebook Is Testing A Dedicated Facebook News Feed

Social network giant Facebook has announced that it is testing a new feature in the US called Facebook News. This new feature is aimed at giving people more control over the stories they see in the Facebook app, and as well the ability to choose news topics that interests them.

"Today we;re starting to test Facebook News, a dedicated place for news on Facebook, to a subset of people in the US," Facebook said. "News gives people more control over the stories they see, and the ability to explore a wider range of their news interests, directly from the Facebook app."


To take on Google News, Facebook has some features to make Facebook News more valuable to users. These include; Today's Stories, Personalization, Topic sections, Your subscriptions, and Controls.

• Today's Stories: These stories chosen by a team of journalist to update users on the news the whole days. This section is at the top of Facebook news.

• Topic sections: In this area, users will dive deep into news categories like business, health, entertainment, science & tech, and sports.

• Personalization: Facebook users here get to find new interests and topics based on the news they read, share and follow. 

• Your subscriptions: This area is for Facebook users that have linked their paid news subscriptions to their Facebook account.

• Controls: This section is for Facebook users to hide articles, topics and publishers they want to see.

Facebook said that it won't rely on machine learning alone to provide quality news destination. It said that it wants to serve both people and news publishers, and not just the big players. The social giant said that it wants new "forms of journalism in the digital age, including individual, independent journalism, to flourish."

The Facebook News will feature a wide range of contents across four categories of publishers: General, Topical, Diverse and Local News. Support for video capability will be added early 2020.