Most of the stories appearing in the News Tab will be algorithmically sorted and ranked, Ms. Brown said. But she said training those algorithms to personalize content to people takes an enormous amount of data and time, which is why Facebook is hiring journalists to curate and surface some of the day’s most important and pertinent news stories. Other tech giants have also pushed into online news publishing with an element of human curation. Apple, for example, has hired traditional journalists to edit and curate Apple News, its subscription news app. LinkedIn has also hired journalists to work on in-house editorial products. Facebook’s News Tab will almost certainly attract the ire of critics across the political spectrum, many of whom believe the social network unfairly favors some political parties and viewpoints over others. In Congress and the White House, conservatives have repeatedly alleged — without evidence — that tech companies like Facebook and Google have suppressed speech from Republicans. Last month, Representative Tulsi Gabbard, a Democrat from Hawaii who is running for president, sued Google, saying the company had infringed on her free speech when it briefly suspended her campaign’s advertising account after the first Democratic debate in June. The genesis of the bias allegations followed a Gizmodo article in 2016 concerning Trending Topics, a discontinued Facebook product that surfaced some of the most popular news and trends to users, and was curated by a mix of algorithms and contract journalists. The article quoted anonymous sources who worked on Trending Topics, claiming that some workers routinely “suppressed” conservative stories from the list. But a Times investigation found that the claims were largely unsubstantiated. On Tuesday, Facebook released the results of a yearlong audit of its platform, which looked into the claims of conservative bias across Facebook. The audit, conducted by former Republican Senator Jon Kyl, found no evidence of bias. The findings drew criticism from Republicans like Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who called it a “smokescreen.” But it also prompted ire from left-leaning groups like Media Matters for America, whose president, Angelo Carusone, called the exercise part of “Facebook’s impulse to appease right-wing cries of bias.” Facebook has said it hopes to release a test of News Tab before the end of the year.
News Feed has launched plans to hire journalists to curate news stories rather than rely on algorithms. It said it would hire experienced journalists from a variety of media outlets for a News Tab section, set for launch on its mobile app, which will run separately to News Feed’s existing Facebook. News Feed has been in talks with publishers about content-sharing deals. Algorithms will sort and rank the stories, but journalists will curate them. The News Tab launch follows criticism of News Feed for spreading misinformation. News Feed has already hired security researchers and content reviewers to tackle bad content.