Facebook Advertises To Hire News Publisher Specialist. Following the accusations of bias and ongoing controversy over fake news, Facebook is urged to hire news credibility specialist and has advertised to approach people able to fact-check content that appears on the website.
It’s been almost two years that company attempted to fight accusations of anti-conservative editing by firing its “trending” news team replacing it with algorithms; now the company has posted the job listings on Thursday.
According to the adverts, Facebook was looking to hire “individuals with a passion for journalism, who believe in Facebook’s mission of making the world more connected”.
Members of the team will be tasked to develope a deep expertise in Facebook’s News Credibility Program, alongside conducting investigations against predefined policies.
After initial media reports about these adverts, Facebook took them down briefly ahead of reposting them with minor tweaks.
With the job title “news publisher specialist”, all references to the company’s news credibility programme have been removed except for the same previous URL. Recruitment for a “passion for journalism” has also been removed in the reposted adverts.
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The two jobs would be based at Facebook’s head office, and one requires fluency in Spanish language. Among other duties, selected candidates would be creating lists of credible news organisations used across the site.
The job adverts take the social media site’s attempts to manage news on its platform full circle. With arrival of 2016, the company’s “trending” module was pulled together by editors, who merged its internal data on what was getting shared with stories published on a variety of mainstream media sources.
While attempting to cut down on hoaxes, Facebook reportedly required editors to check respectable news organisations before pushing a story to its trending section. Trending section is a move that prompted complaints of leftwing bias from US conservatives, who has complained that the list included sites like the New York Times and CNN but not Breitbart or the Washington Examiner.
Facebook announced the closure of its trending section altogether, the last week. Now, the company is seeking a new approach to its platform, de-prioritising news in favour of stories from friends & family, while more aggressively seeking way to support news from “trusted” outlets and working out ways to suppress the spread of hoaxes and fakes directly.
