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Jan. 18, 2018 Facebook unveiled major changes Friday to the News Feed of its 2 billion users, announcing it will rank news organizations by credibility based on user feedback and diminish its role as an arbiter of the news people see. More than two-thirds of Americans now get some of their news from social media, according to Pew Research Center. That shift has empowered Facebook and Google, putting them in an uncomfortable position of deciding what news they should distribute to their global audiences. But it also has led to questions about whether these corporations should be considered media companies. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/01/19/facebook-will-now-ask-its-users-to-rank-news-organizations-they-trust/" rel="nofollow">www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/01/19/face...</a>

The Economist | Just the two of them IN LATE 2017 Google and Facebook made changes to help support the news organisations that provide them content. Facebook began displaying the logos of publishers in some of its posts, so readers can identify the news source. And Google for the first time gave publishers the ability to control how many times the search engine’s users can visit news sites free of charge. Both will directly help papers to sell subscriptions.

"That the tech giants are making concessions on some of these points may be because they sense that the political mood is turning against them in America and in Europe, or because of genuine concern for the media ecosystem. Several newspaper executives say Google’s dealings with them seemed more sincere than Facebook’s. But both firms’ changes to click-through policies are significant. But selling digital ads on their own websites is a challenge for most news organisations, in part because of the competition from the duopoly. Facebook and Alphabet [parent of google and youTube] will take the majority of all digital-ad revenue globally this year, and, by some measures, have recently taken 80-90% of the growth in such revenue. Their data on users’ browsing activities give them a huge advantage in micro-targeting users. Wherever journalism turns, Facebook and Google loom large. Their recent moves, although welcome to many publishers, are unlikely to alter the trajectory of the relationship."