Facebook News Tests Human Sourcing

Starting today, Facebook News is testing the use of “seasoned journalists” instead of algorithms to pick news stories that will appear on users news feeds. Right now, only a subset of mobile app users are seeing these stories, according to NPR, but it will likely be expanded if this test works. Facebook News has been extensively criticized from both the right and left political spectrum for what has appeared until now. According to Facebook in the NPR article, algorithms can’t determine if a news story is well-sourced and it is believed that seasoned journalist can. It will be interesting to see if human news sourcing is better than algorithm-based decision making.