Facebook takes on Twitter and fake news stories

Facebook today announced that they’ve partnered with News Corp’s Storyful to create FB Newswire. Storyful’s tag line is, “When everyone is sharing content, Storyful finds the stories worth telling.” They’re essentially a filter for social content. Facebook’s goal in this deal is to offer, “…a resource for journalists and newsrooms to find, share and embed newsworthy content from Facebook in the media they produce.” Interesting stuff — Facebook pivots from being a personal source of information to being a professional source of content that has its source social media. They’re doing even more than that…

When you combine this with their new Trending Topics and changes to the way the news feed works, Facebook is making a play for Twitter’s relevance but with a much richer “surround sound” that has far greater personal information than simply tweets.

Where this gets really interesting is this — by sourcing verified news, Facebook is taking on those stupid “news” stories that fly around Twitter…and Facebook…and making themselves into a much deeper platform. How many of us would have said, “What does Facebook say?” before? This is a smart move and puts Facebook in a different part of the market.

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Christopher Taylor