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Human Curators Are Behind New Facebook Featured Events

It recently began offering Event ads that lead directly to a ticket purchase site instead of the Facebook RSVP. Businesses rely on it to spread the word about parties, promotions, happenings, and so on, while everyday consumers use it to pick the destinations and events they’d like to visit in their leisure times, as well as to spread the word to their closest friends.

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Facebook Events product manager Aditya Koolwal tells TechCrunch that regular Events users will receive a push notification, which will give them “enough time to say what the Featured Events are, reach out to friends, and see if they want to go”. “Events on these lists are drawn from art, entertainment, family, festival, fitness, food and drink, learning, community, music and sports events, and we try to find events that appeal to a wide audience”, the company wrote.

Finally, Facebook will offer event categories alongside its curated list of events to help you find other events that you might be interested in. But, despite Facebook’s obsession with breaking features out into their own individual apps, there are now no plans to release a standalone Events app. Notably, Facebook came under a huge controversy in May when it was accused of suppressing conservative stories in Trending Topics. The events curation team “will not include events primarily focused on politics or worship”.

For now, Facebook is rolling out Featured Events feature to Facebook iOS app users in 10 USA cities. Another way would actually to be invited to said event.

This may be a small change in the grand scheme of using Facebook, but some of the 550 million monthly users of Facebook Events will surely notice.

Facebook for iOS users in the cities where the feature will be first rolled out will see a carousel on top of their list of upcoming events. These are a list of events that have been curated by actual people, meaning that it won’t be generated by a computer and will be generated by people who think that these events could be worth checking out.

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Facebook Events has quietly grown into one of the company’s most powerful and unique features.

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