Facebook now enabling Canadian publishers to label stories as breaking news

Facebook has announced that it’s rolling out a feature that will allow publishers around the world to identify and label breaking news.

The social media giant previously tested the feature in the U.S. before today’s global expansion.

Now, Facebook says more than 50 additional publishers in North America, Latin America, Europe and Australia will be to take part in the test, enabling them to label Instant Articles, mobile and web links and Facebook Live content as breaking news. Facebook says more publishers will be added to the test if it proves successful.

While it’s unclear how many Canadian publishers are part of the test, Facebook did confirm that Global News is involved.

Publishers will be able to use the breaking news indicator once a day and select how long the story will be marked as such, in a period of up to six hours. Facebook says publishers will also be given an extra pool of 5 indicators per month.

Publishers will be able to track how well their breaking news-tagged posts are performing in Page Insights, while readers can provide feedback on stories they don’t consider breaking news by clicking in the top-right drop-down menu of a post.

From this initial test, we’ve seen positive results. Early data from December 8th to January 14th shows that people in the US engage more with posts that are labeled as breaking news. Over the course of a month there was a:

So far, Facebook says early data collected in its U.S. testing between December 8th and January 14th showed greater engagement with posts labelled as breaking news. In particular, Facebook says that there was a four percent lift in clickthrough rate, seven percent increase in likes, four percent rise of comments and 11 percent spike in shares.

Facebook says this is an early test it will continue to work with publishers through its Facebook Journalism Project to improve the initiative.