Internal Facebook Memo Reveals Guidelines for Showcasing News

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Facebook has said repeatedly that it isn’t in the journalism business, but a team of human editors responsible for an upcoming news initiative by the company will exercise significant control over the presentation of top stories, including judging them over their use of anonymous sources, according to internal guidelines seen by The Information.

While Facebook’s plans to hire human editors for an upcoming news tab have been previously reported, the guidelines, which Facebook recently shared with employees in an internal memo, offer the first insight into how the team will make decisions that could affect the news stories millions of people see. One person who has seen a version of the tab being tested by Facebook employees said it featured stories from The Wall Street Journal, ABC News, CBS News, National Geographic, BBC, The Huffington Post, and The Hill, though some of those publishers don’t appear to have officially struck agreements with Facebook yet.

The Takeaway

Guidelines reveal how Facebook editors will pick stories for news tab
Editors instructed to “impartially share” stories about Facebook itself
Stories with on-the-record sources will be given priority

The editors will be responsible for a “Top Stories” section of the upcoming news tab—which will debut for Facebook app users in October in the U.S., a person familiar with the matter said—and will handpick stories from a group of media outlets that are approved to appear in the tab. The team of editors will be responsible for updating the Top Stories section of the tab throughout the day with breaking news stories.

According to the memo, the other guidelines Facebook is giving to its editors include:

Editors will wait for two whitelisted media outlets—publishers who have qualified to be listed as official news sources on Facebook—to confirm a breaking news story if the story is based on an “unsubstantiated report.” How a report would be defined as “unsubstantiated” couldn’t be learned.
Editors won’t feature stories “constructed to provoke, divide, and polarize,” but Facebook notes that “fact-based stories that rely upon journalistic standards” will be promoted even if they are “divisive.”
Headlines that include profanity or obscenities won't be featured.
Editors will “prioritize stories with on-the-record sources rather than anonymous sources.”
Editors will seek to promote the media outlet that first reported a particular news story, and additionally prioritize stories broken by local news outlets. “If a local story then becomes the subject of national or international coverage, we will make subsequent, independent decisions about those developments,” the social network’s internal guidelines note.
Facebook said that editors will “show a range of topics and publishers” with the goal of showing “a diversity of voices.”
Facebook said it will also tell its editors that they shouldn’t censor bad news about the company itself. Editors will be instructed to “impartially share stories about Facebook, Facebook executives, and tech at large,” according to the internal memo.

Facebook is paying up to $3 million to individual news publishers to include their stories in the news tab, which will be prominently featured in the Facebook app, according to people familiar with the situation. The Wall Street Journal previously reported that figure.

Facebook’s effort to curate the stories viewed by its 2.4 billion users comes as the company faces mounting concern from across the political spectrum over its policies around news. The company has faced a ferocious backlash over the spread of disinformation on its network since the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Conservatives, meanwhile, have accused Facebook and Google of political bias in how they present news. In 2016, Facebook was pilloried after editors who worked on a similar news initiative for the company, called Trending Topics, said they routinely suppressed stories from conservative outlets.

At the same time, the company has stressed that it isn’t a news publisher itself, a position many internet companies have adopted and which aligns with their desire to shield themselves from greater liability over the content users distribute through their service. "We aren't in the news business,” Facebook’s head of global policy management Monika Bickert said in a CNN interview in May, explaining why the company hadn’t removed a doctored video of House speaker Nancy Pelosi from Facebook. “We're in the social media business.”

This time around, Facebook hopes to avoid allegations of bias in the news tab by imposing stricter editorial rules for editors and hiring them as full time employees rather than outside contractors, said people familiar with the company’s thinking. Below the top stories selected by editors, the Facebook news tab will show a feed of stories, selected by software algorithms based on the publishers users follow.

Editors at many prominent news organizations have pressured staff to minimize their reliance on anonymous sources, as a way of instilling greater trust in their journalism with audiences. But the practice of using anonymous sources is a deep-rooted one in many newsrooms, and penalizing articles that rely on it could make it harder for Facebook users to see many important stories.

A spokesperson for Facebook declined to comment for this story.

Facebook is currently hiring a small team of editors—the company calls them “news curators”—with backgrounds in journalism to feature stories from participating publishers. The effort to hire news editors is being led by Anne Kornblut, a Pulitzer Prize–winning former editor for The Washington Post who joined Facebook in 2015, The Information previously reported.

Alex Heath is a reporter at The Information covering social media companies along with augmented and virtual reality. He is based in Los Angeles and you can find him on Twitter @alexeheath.

Jessica Toonkel is a New York-based reporter for The Information covering media and how the industry is being disrupted by technology. Before that, she spent seven years at Reuters covering a range of topics including media, mergers and acquisitions and financial services. She can be found on Twitter @jtoonkel.