Facebook’s Dive Into Local News
Social media platform Facebook is adding a new aspect to its user’s news feeds: local news coverage. This is to combat the fake news epidemic that struck the site as a part of the most recent Presidential election. While Facebook aims to brings communities closer together with this offering, Newhouse social media Professor Jennifer Grygiel sees many issues with this idea. She shared these opinions in a recent article for Daily Mail Online.
“What you are going to see is a rise in state-run media if this applies to every official page in your neighborhood,” says Grygiel. “We are potentially getting more misinformation because we have lost the gatekeepers and fact-checkers in journalism. Journalists have a role in our society, and I don’t think Mark Zuckerberg has figured out what that is yet.”