Local news, courtesy of artificial intelligence
Facebook is cautiously expanding a feature that shows people local news and information, including missing-person alerts, road closures, crime reports and school announcements.
Called Today In, the service shows people information from their towns and cities from such sources as news outlets, government entities and community groups. Facebook began the service in January in six cities and expanded that to 25, then more. On Wednesday, Today In expanded to 400 cities in the United States — and a few in Australia.
The move comes as the Menlo Park company tries to shake off its reputation as a hotbed for misinformation and elections-meddling and attempts to rather be a place for communities and people to come together and stay informed.
Facebook isn’t paying anyone to include posts, nor can a business or group pay to be listed — at least for now. Today In is the brainchild of the Facebook Journalism project, a broad undertaking to boost the news industry, including local news. Of course, Facebook, along with other internet companies, is partly to blame for the decline of local print newspapers.
Here are some things to know about this effort, and why it matters:
The big picture: It’s something users have asked for, the company says. Think of it as an evolution of the “trending” feature that the company dropped this year. That feature, which showed news articles that were popular among users, was rife with such problems as fake news and accusations of bias.
Anthea Watson Strong, product manager for local news and community information, said her team learned from the problems with that feature.
“We feel deeply the mistakes of our foremothers and forefathers,” she said.
This time around, Facebook employees went to some of the cities where the feature was initially implemented and met with users. They tried to predict problems by doing what they called “pre-mortem” assessments, she said. That is, instead of a post mortem, where engineers dissect what went wrong after the fact, they tried to anticipate how people might misuse elements of Today In — for financial gain, for example.
Facebook isn’t saying how long it has been taking this approach, though the practice isn’t unique to the company. Nonetheless, it’s a significant step, because many of Facebook’s current problems stem from its failure to foresee how bad actors might co-opt the service.
Facebook also hopes the feature’s slow introduction will prevent problems.
How it works: To find out if Today In is available in your city or town, tap the menu icon with the three horizontal lines. Then scroll down until you see it. If you want, you can choose to see the local updates directly in your news feed.
“We feel deeply the mistakes of our foremothers and forefathers.” Anthea Watson Strong, product manager for local news and community information
For now, the company is offering this only in small and midsize cities, such as Conroe, Texas; Morgantown, W. Va.; and Santa Fe, N.M. Large cities such as New York or Los Angeles have added challenges, such as an abundance of news and information, and may need to be broken up into smaller neighborhoods.
The posts in Today In are selected by artificial intelligence; there is no human involvement. The service aggregates posts from the Facebook pages for news organizations, government agencies and community groups like dog shelters. For this reason, a kid couldn’t declare a snow day, because Today In relies on the school’s official page. Discussion posts from local Facebook groups may also be included.
How Facebook’s algorithms decide what to include is an ongoing process. For someone in New Orleans, posts could come from the Times-Picayune newspaper, the city council, the public library, the regional transit authority or the Facebook group Where NOLA Eats, which has 42,570 members. The algorithm looks for something called “local affinity” — Facebook pages whose followers live near the entity that runs the page.
For now, the information is tailored only by geography, but this might change. A person with no kids, for example, might not want to see updates from schools.
Safeguards: Facebook uses software filters to weed out objectionable content, just as it does on people’s regular news feeds. But the filters are turned up for Today In. If a good friend posts something a bit objectionable, you would probably still see it, because Facebook takes your friendship into account. But Today In posts aren’t coming from your friends, so Facebook is more likely to keep it out.
But as the feature expands, Facebook will have to guard against misuse, so fake news and the other problems with the trending tool don’t crop up.