Facebook Puts Sponsored Stories Into News Feed And Calls Them Featured Stories

Brace yourself for the wave of complaints that will surely come: As previously announced, Facebook began to add sponsored stories to users' news feeds Tuesday.

Brace yourself for the wave of complaints that will surely come: As previously announced, Facebook began to add sponsored stories to users’ news feeds Tuesday.

The sponsored stories contain an indication next to the time stamp that the post is “featured,” and users need not worry about random ad content infiltrating their news feeds, as the only sponsored stories they will see are from pages they have already liked.

Content from pages users’ friends have liked and interacted with may appear, as well, but advertisers cannot alter the messages included with that content.

Sister blog Inside Facebook reported that Facebook will initially limit sponsored stories in the news feed to one per day, and they will not appear when the social network is accessed on mobile devices.

TechCrunch took issue with the language being used by Facebook, saying that “featured” doesn’t denote that the content is paid advertising, and that posts labeled with that...

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