Facebook to hire a small team of journalists to curate a Top News section in its upcoming news tab, which it plans to release as a test before the year-end
SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook has long relied on algorithms to select news stories for its users to see.
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook has built its news distribution almost entirely on algorithms, so the plan to hire a small team of journalists to hand-pick a Top News section is a notable concession that ranking alone isn't doing the job. It extends a hybrid human-plus-AI approach Facebook first tested with Today In, its local news feature combining curation and AI across six US cities.
The move also foreshadows what shipped two months later: in October 2019 Facebook began testing [[a:947155|Facebook News with a subset of US users across four publisher categories — general, topical, diverse, and local]] — making this year-end test the first concrete step toward a dedicated news surface.
First-order effects
- A small group of hired editors becomes an explicit gatekeeper at Facebook, deciding which stories reach the Top News slot — a role previously held solely by the ranking algorithm.
- Publishers whose stories get curated gain a guaranteed high-visibility placement that algorithmic distribution never promised.
Second-order effects
- Rival platforms face pressure to justify their own fully algorithmic feeds as Facebook legitimizes human curation of news at scale.
- Inside Facebook, the curation team's choices create a new tension with the core feed product, since editorial picks can diverge from what engagement-optimized ranking would surface.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, platform news distribution splits into two tiers — algorithmic and editorially curated — and Facebook's later push to build newsletter tools for journalists and writers suggests it intends to keep deepening these direct relationships with the press.
- The more visible Facebook's editorial judgments become, the more the company invites scrutiny of its curation decisions — turning news selection from a black-box ranking question into a public accountability issue.
The trend: Social platforms are reinserting human editorial judgment alongside recommendation algorithms, with Facebook moving first on dedicated, curated news surfaces.