Good News To Writers as Facebook Set to Pay For Quality Content

Image result for Zuckerberg: Facebook Considering Paying Publishers for ‘High Quality News

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg raised the possibility that Facebook could start paying news publishers to feature their “high-quality news” on the social network, declaring that the company could “potentially have a direct relationship with publishers.”

According to Recode, Zuckerberg “wants to create a section of his social network that would be devoted to ‘high-quality news,’ and may pay publishers that share their stuff there.”

Image result for Zuckerberg: Facebook Considering Paying Publishers for ‘High Quality News

“We talked about the role quality journalism plays in building informed communities and the principles Facebook should use for building a news tab to surface more high-quality news, including the business model and ecosystem to support it,” declared Zuckerberg, adding that Facebook could “potentially have a direct relationship with publishers to make sure that their content is available, if it’s really high-quality content.”

“That’s definitely something that I think we should be thinking about here, because the relationship between us and publishers is different in a surface where we’re showing the content on the basis of us believing that it’s high-quality, trustworthy content,” he continued. “We’re coming to this from a very different perspective than I think some of the other players in the space who view news as a way that they want to maximize their revenue. That’s not necessarily the way that we’re thinking about this.”

Image result for Zuckerberg: Facebook Considering Paying Publishers for ‘High Quality News

If Facebook becomes a publisher, it could lose its immunity under Section 230.In April 2018, Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) grilled Zuckerberg on whether Facebook was a publisher or a neutral tech company.

After Facebook announced it would be publishing exclusive content from mainstream, left-wing news outlets last year, Breitbart News’ Senior Tech Reporter Allum Bokhari noted, “Now that Facebook has announced its program of publishing exclusive news content from establishment and left-leaning outlets, it will be much harder for the company to escape the charge that it is no longer a neutral, unbiased platform.”

“This could mean Facebook falls outside the bounds of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which currently grants it legal immunity for content posted by Facebook users,” he continued. “If Facebook is held legally responsible for the billions of posts published on the platform, it would be a fundamental threat to its business model.”

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