Facebook, nodding to its role in media, starts journalism project

Facebook will also develop training programs and tools for journalists to teach them how to better search its site to report on news and events.

[...] Facebook wants to help train members of the public to find news sources they trust, while fighting the spread of fake news across its site.

In an interview about the Facebook Journalism Project, Fidji Simo, a director of product at the company, said: We’ve heard loud and clear over the last year that there are questions about our role in this ecosystem.

Facebook also regularly changes its algorithms, which can make or break a publisher’s traffic and revenue.

Because of such changes, sites like Elite Daily and Upworthy have experienced wide swings in traffic.

Facebook is also partly responsible for an upheaval in the advertising industry, with online ad dollars now being spent on the social network and Google instead of directly with publishers.

Google and Facebook accounted for nearly all the growth in the U.S. digital advertising market in the first half of 2016, according to estimates from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and company earnings reports.

“There would be times when Facebook would come to us with a new product or function, but by the time we were invited to participate, product development was already kind of a done deal,” said Shailesh Prakash, the chief intelligence officer and vice president for digital product development for the Washington Post.

Facebook said it hopes to train audiences with “news literacy” programs to better spot false news, as well as by producing public service announcements about how to determine which news sources to trust.