Facebook announces COVID-19 'information centre' on News Feed for accurate, current news about pandemic

Facebook, the social media and technology company whose stated aim is to bring people closer, has surprisingly taken kindly to calls for social distancing to ward off the spread of the coronavirus.
Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s CEO announced that Facebook will start placing a new element called the coronavirus “information centre” at the top of users’ News Feeds. The information centre will be rolled out in the United States, Italy, the United Kingdom, Spain, France, and Germany over the next 24 hours. It will soon be rolled out in the countries, including news updates in different languages.

This is in line with what Facebook-subsidiary Instagram has done vis a vis its efforts to combat fake news pertaining to the public health crisis precipitated by the coronavirus outbreak.

Facebook’s coronavirus information centre will provide accurate and current news about the pandemic, sourced from reliable entities like verified news outlets and organisations like the World Health Organization.

Zuckerberg added that the feed will also incorporate Facebook posts from local health officials, legislators, and celebrities that extoll the virtues of social distancing as a deterrent to community transmission of the illness.

"We're designing it to be very adaptive so that on a day-to-day basis the messages ... vary from location to location," Zuckerberg said in an announcement. He added that people were aware of the danger posed by the virus due to the preponderance of online articles, but needed to be convinced that social distancing is an important tool to stanch disease transfer.

The new feature on the Facebook app will include statistics of confirmed COVID-19 cases that will be tracked in real times, as well as a section called “Why You Should Stay At Home,” which has articles written by medical experts on benefits of social distancing.