Facebook is removing its Trending News section, introducing more solid sources of information.
In a clear attempt to solidify its top position as the world’s most popular social medium, Mark Zuckerberg’s digital child announced the series of changes and updates, today:
We’re removing Trending soon to make way for future news experiences on Facebook. We introduced Trending in 2014 as a way to help people discover news topics that were popular across the Facebook community. However, it was only available in five countries and accounted for less than 1.5% of clicks to news publishers on average. From research we found that over time people found the product to be less and less useful. We will remove Trending from Facebook next week and we will also remove products and third-party partner integrations that rely on the Trends API.
What is Facebook planning to do exactly?
Facebook news – Photo by Sticker Mule on Unsplash
Here’s what Alex Hardiman, Head of News Products, stated about what’s coming up:
- Breaking News Label: A test we’re running with 80 publishers across North America, South America, Europe, India and Australia lets publishers put a “breaking news” indicator on their posts in News Feed. We’re also testing breaking news notifications.
- Today In: We’re testing a dedicated section on Facebook called Today In that connects people to the latest breaking and important news from local publishers in their city, as well as updates from local officials and organizations.
- News Video in Watch: We will soon have a dedicated section on Facebook Watch in the US where people can view live coverage, daily news briefings and weekly deep dives that are exclusive to Watch.
For better or worse, people that spend a lot of time on Facebook scrolling through the timelines of friends and those of friends of friends and so forth, a) have too much free time on their hands, and b) literally get their news from Facebook.
We only wish there was an option to turn that feature off, it’d be awesome.
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