Facebook could start employing editors to select “high-quality news” to show to users, in the social network’s latest attempt to lose its reputation as a source for disinformation.

Mark Zuckerberg said he is considering the introduction of a dedicated news section on the social network, which could use either humans or algorithms to chose stories from outlets that are “broadly trusted” by society.

“We’re not going to have journalists making news,” said the social network boss, who explained the aim of the new feature would be to promote material produced by third parties. “What we want to do is make sure that this is a product that can get people high-quality news.”

Zuckerberg also said he is considering whether Facebook should start paying news publishers to include their articles in this news section in order to reward “high-quality, trustworthy content”.

Facebook sources suggest the news product has been in development for some time and should be ready to launch by the end of this year.

A system in which human editors are involved in choosing which news stories should be shown to users would be a break with Facebook’s traditional approach of using algorithms to highlight material.

The news feature would be a separate section of Facebook which would run in parallel with the long-established news feed, the first screen users see after login which mixes friends’ holiday photos with posts from news outlets and other pages that Facebook users have chosen to follow.

Zuckerberg estimated that between 10-20% of the Facebook audience would be interested in the proposed section, with the majority of the site’s users avoiding it because they want “to see what’s going on with their friends” rather than read journalism.

The proposed product would have similarities with Facebook’s existing Watch product for video or Apple News, which already employs human editors to choose stories which are then pushed to tens of millions of Apple users. The move would be likely to benefit long-established traditional publishers, which tend to top trust rankings and have been long-time critics of the existing Facebook model.

Facebook has largely avoided paying publishers for news material, instead suggesting they should appreciate the extra readers being sent to sites by referrals from the social network.

Facebook’s previous record of of using human editors to oversee news has been patchy. It sacked all the staff working on its trending news feature after they were accused of pro-liberal bias in the US by Republican politicians, leaving the social network with a reputational headache during the 2016 US Presidential election which predated widespread concerns about fake news and disinformation

Zuckerberg made the comments in a lengthy discussion with Mathias Döpfner, the chief executive of German publishing house Axel Springer, who has been a regular critic of the social network and the lack of revenue it sends to news publishers.