Facebook may have been slammed for fuelling the rise of fake news in recent years, but the company is putting its money where its mouth is in an attempt to tackle the problem and win back public favour.
Thanks to this, the public will soon be able to watch original news shows on Facebook via its Watch channel.
The social media giant will fork out for the shows’ fresh content, featuring alongside its news feed in an attempt to combat the rise of fake news and improve the quality of the information its putting out it has said.
The shows, which will see content made specifically for the platform, will be funded by Facebook and made by top media organisations like ABC and CNN.
It will launch in the next few months and will feature ad breaks, with hosts including famous faces such as Anderson Cooper of CNN, Shepard Smith of Fox News and Jorge Ramos of Univision.
“We tried to assemble a diverse set of partners who are already doing quality news who are also really adept at engaging the audience,” said Campbell Brown, Facebook’s head of news partnerships.
She has also tipped that the shows will experiment with social media features such as polls, possibly yielding a further merging of social and the media, and interactive watching habits.
However critics say the move will mean closer monitoring of the new channels is needed and that it cements Facebook’s status as a media platform, a label which Mark Zuckerberg and his team have previously denied.
The move comes after the site closed its trending news section, which it claimed was so it could focus on trustworthy and informative news.
Facebook’s Watch section was launched last year to feature original videos but hasn’t garnered as much traffic as the news feed did.