Facebook responds to critics with plan to invest $300m in local news
Facebook is investing $300m (£233m) in local journalism projects amid mounting criticism over fake news on its platform and its role in the demise of regional newspapers.
The company said it would be investing in local reporters and newsrooms as well as helping media organisations to create sustainable business models.
It said the three-year project would be part of its efforts to "fight fake news, misinformation, and low quality news on Facebook", and said there was an "opportunity and a responsibility, to help local news organisations grow and thrive".
News of the investment comes just days after Facebook unveiled a new fact-checking service in the UK to deal with disinformation on its site, as it struggles to cope with the onslaught of accounts posting such content. The announcement is among the first initiatives since Sir Nick Clegg, Britain's former deputy prime minister, joined Facebook as head of global affairs and communications tasked with repairing the company's reputation.
Facebook has been battling the rise of fake news online since it discovered that a Russian troll farm had been using its platform to spread misleading content in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election. During that election, some fake news stories were shared more than real stories.
However, even though Facebook is aware of the issues, and deletes many of those accounts it finds responsible, it has so far been unable to stamp out bad actors completely and in November revealed it had removed more than 1.5 billion fake accounts in the six month period starting June.
Earlier this year, Damian Collins, the chairman of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport committee, said: "We are facing nothing less than a crisis in our democracy – based on the systematic manipulation of data to support the relentless targeting of citizens, without their consent, by campaigns of disinformation and messages of hate."
In announcing the new investment on Tuesday, Facebook's vice president of global news partnerships, Campbell Brown, said that, over time the project should help "foster civic engagement, which research suggests is directly correlated with people’s reading of local news".
As part of the total $300m, around $6m of that had already been earmarked for the Community News Project in the UK, a fund which local news organisations including Reach and Newsquest can use to recruit trainee journalists and pay their salaries. This portion of money had been announced in November.
Facebook said another chunk, of more than $20m, would go into extending its Accelerator pilot to Europe, as well as other regions.
Currently the Accelerator programme is only running in the US. It is designed to help publishers build their digital subscription numbers through weekly training sessions and meetings with Facebook experts on how to grow communities.
The latest initiative, like that launched by Google last year in which it too pledged to spend $300m on journalism projects, is being seen as an attempt to relieve some of the pressure media organisations are under.
Print advertising and circulation revenue has been in decline for years across the UK and US, and many news organisations have been unable to replace this with digital sales, due to Facebook and Google's dominance in online advertising.
However, some critics say the funds will essentially make media organisations reliant on Facebook and Google, organisations that have for years played "fast and loose" with their content.
The chief executive of Newsquest, Henry Faure Walker, this summer hit out at Facebook for "free-riding" on the investment regional publishers were putting into local content.
And, early last year, the social network dealt another blow to local journalism, changing its algorithm to reduce their priority on users' newsfeeds, instead promoting more content from their friends and family.
