Campbell Brown, head of news partnerships, Facebook, is actively defending the company’s decision to include sites like Breitbart in the recently launched News Tab, reports Business Insider.
“I believe that in building out a destination for news on Facebook, we should include content from ideological publishers on both the left and the right — as long as that content meets our integrity standards for misinformation,” Campbell wrote in a public Facebook post on Wednesday. “All the content on Facebook News today meets those standards.”
The idea of the News Tab is that, through a verification process, Facebook News will provide news curation that enables readers to trust the pieces they read in that tab. Brown also said that through this, the tech giant hopes to “sustain great journalism and strengthen democracy.”
Facebook’s selection of Breitbart News invoked a lot of criticism. Breitbart was once described by its cofounder and former executive director, Steve Bannon, as “the platform for the alt-right.”
Although Brown did not specifically mention the said site, she did comment, “There will invariably be news organizations, ideological or otherwise, who say or write things that I find abhorrent. But I will always stand by their right to express their views. It has been a long held American ideal that we win the day with better arguments, not by silencing those we disagree with.”
However, she is not the only one defending the tech company’s decision.
On Sunday, Instagram boss Adam Mosseri defended the decision while responding to a critique by the New York Times journalist Charlie Warzel on Twitter: “Two things to consider: (1) do you really want platform as big as Facebook embracing a political ideology? And (2) not as important, and this is an honest question, why such a different reaction to Breitbart being Apple News partner?”
Facebook News is currently live in a test form for some US Facebook users. It is scheduled to launch in early 2020.
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