Facebook is planning to launch Facebook News in multiple countries within the next six months to a year, the social media giant said in a blog post on Tuesday.
It is considering India and other markets such as the UK, Germany, France and Brazil for the launch. “In each country, we’ll pay news publishers to ensure their content is available in the new product,” Campbell Brown, VP, global news partnerships, wrote.
Facebook referred to the new product as a ‘personalised’ destination for news within the platform, with users getting top headlines and stories for the day based on their interests. News is only available on the Facebook apps for Android and iPhone in the US currently.
Brown said the US launch of Facebook News marked a new chapter in the company’s relationship with the news industry, adding it had been off to a ‘strong start.’ Facebook News was launched in the US in June.
“Helping publishers reach new audiences has been one of our most important goals, and we’ve found over 95% of the traffic Facebook News delivers to publishers is incremental to the traffic they already get from News Feed,” he added.
Sensing declining ad revenues for the media industry due to the Covid-19 pandemic, some countries have been demanding that technology companies should pay publishers for news content. Late last month, Australia’s competition regulator announced a plan to force companies like Google and Facebook to pay news outlets for content, under a news media bargaining code.
The companies could be asked to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in fines for non compliance under the code released by The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission as per reports.
In France, antitrust regulators ordered Google to pay for content from French publishers in April.
Facebook has been at the forefront a political controversy around hate speech posts in India after a Wall Street Journal report alleged that a senior Facebook executive opposed applying its hate speech rules on controversial posts of a BJP leader and three other Hindu nationalist individuals and groups for violating its standards. Facebook has, however, said that it is open, transparent and non-partisan.
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