Emily Bell, director at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University noted that Facebook's changes “...highlight how ownership of the user is a central tension between news producers and platforms.”
The NYT article goes on to note: "Publishers have little choice but to deal with the changes that Facebook makes, given the dependent relationship news media companies have with the social network. Some 44 percent of adults in the United States regularly read news content on the site, according to a 2016 study by the Pew Research Center. And more than 40 percent of referral traffic to news sites comes from Facebook, according to data from Parse.ly, a digital publishing analytics company."
If you own the audience, you want members of that audience to be happy with the content they engage with on your social network. And if "news of family" generated by audience members is more important than "news of the world" generated by journalists, you "tweak the algorithm."
What concerns me is not only that Facebook users place little value on news of the world, but also that users might isolate themselves from news that doesn't fit their own personal algorithm. Laura Brown (@LBonPlanetEarth) of Politico made this point eloquently in her presentation on a News Feed Divided.
Yes, Facebook is exerting a lot of pressure over the newsfeed. But the users are exerting even more. When we opt to read something that is referred by a friend because we know that friend holds views similar to our own, we are narrowing our world view. When fact checkers become irrelevant because we can't agree on what constitutes fact, honest dialogue gives way to boisterous demagogues.
The NYT concludes: “The growth and competition in the publisher ecosystem is really, really strong,” Adam Mosseri, vice president of product management for the news feed at Facebook, said in a recent interview with reporters. “We’re worried that a lot of people using Facebook are not able to connect to friends and family as well because of that.”
What concerns me is not only that Facebook users place little value on news of the world, but also that users might isolate themselves from news that doesn't fit their own personal algorithm. Laura Brown (@LBonPlanetEarth) of Politico made this point eloquently in her presentation on a News Feed Divided.
Yes, Facebook is exerting a lot of pressure over the newsfeed. But the users are exerting even more. When we opt to read something that is referred by a friend because we know that friend holds views similar to our own, we are narrowing our world view. When fact checkers become irrelevant because we can't agree on what constitutes fact, honest dialogue gives way to boisterous demagogues.
The NYT concludes: “The growth and competition in the publisher ecosystem is really, really strong,” Adam Mosseri, vice president of product management for the news feed at Facebook, said in a recent interview with reporters. “We’re worried that a lot of people using Facebook are not able to connect to friends and family as well because of that.”
No need to worry about who owns the press anymore. But we do need to gain a better understanding of the whole "publisher ecosystem" and the role that each of us plays in building a sustainable public dialogue.
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