"Fake news is bad,
Zuckerberg acting as the world's ultimate gatekeeper is bad, users deciding
which news orgs are 'trustworthy' is bad, Facebook is bad."
Thursday, May 03, 2018
Progressive and independent
journalists are raising grave concerns this week about Facebook's plan to
fashion itself as an arbiter of what news outlets should be deemed
"trustworthy"—arguing that the social media giant's new proposal will
punish non-corporate news sources and journalists offering left-leaning news
analysis that it finds to be "polarizing."
Richard Kim, executive editor
of The Nation magazine, was among those reacting critically to the social media
giant's announcement on Monday:
So @facebook &
Zuckerberg say they will rank news sites based on trustworthiness, with a goal
to reduce "polarization" Depending on how it is implemented, could be
disastrous for opinion journalism & the key role it plays in
democracy. https://t.co/0tvB4m2CpW
— Richard Kim
(@RichardKimNYC) May
2, 2018
In his keynote speech at
Facebook's annual developer conference on Tuesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that
the company has already begun surveying its two billion users about the news
sources they recognize and rely on the most, to determine which media outlets
are "broadly trusted." The results of the data-gathering will
determine how widely news outlets are featured on user's news feeds.
"We put [that data] into
the system, and it is acting as a boost or a suppression, and we're going to
dial up the intensity of that over time," Zuckerberg told media executives
after the speech. "We feel like we have a responsibility to further
[break] down polarization and find common ground."
The CEO's meeting with the
media included representatives from some of the largest news organizations in
the country, including the New York Times, BuzzFeed, Atlantic
Media, CNN, and News Corp., according
to the Huffington Post.
It also follows months
of criticism of Facebook after the alleged spread of misinformation on
the platform during the 2016 presidential campaign.
"It's not useful if
someone's just kind of repeating the same thing and attempting to polarize or
drive people to the extremes," Zuckerberg explained to a crowd of
developers regarding how the company has begun to decide which news sources are
credible.
But while combating the spread
of misinformation is a worthy cause, argued some critics, Zuckerberg—CEO of a
powerful corporation and one of the world's wealthiest individuals—should not
use survey results to support his role as a self-styled "gatekeeper"
of trustworthy and untrustworthy news sources.
As Julianne Tveten wrote at In
These Times last fall, Facebook began flagging so-called "fake
news" after the election, along with other major tech companies like
Google, which pledged
in April 2017 to "surface more authoritative pages and demote
low-quality content" in its search engine results, as Facebook is now
doing with its news feed.
"These adjustments,
however, haven't stifled propaganda. On the contrary, they may have stifled
dissent," Tveten wrote, noting that left-leaning news sources have seen
their readership plummet since the companies implemented those changes.
Common Dreams is one non-profit
and progressive news outlet that has seen significant
drops in traffic since Google and Facebook began changing
algorithms and talking openly about their new attempts to control the kind of
news content users see. According to internal data and Google Analytics, traffic
to Common Dreams from Google searches fell by 34 percent after the
powerful search giant unveiled its new search protocol in April 2017.
"There's a lot we still
don't understand about how we're being impacted by the kinds of changes these
companies are making, but it's very unsettling to see this kind of power
wielded by corporate interests who seem so detached from the mission of sites
like ours and the role in general that progressive media and independent
journalism play in this society," said Jon Queally, Common Dreams managing
editor.
Other critics noted that while
corporate outlets like MSNBC, the Washington Post, and
the New York Times will likely be proclaimed "broadly
trusted" in Zuckerberg's data-collection endeavor, these
"established" news sources have a rich and dubious history of
misleading and damaging reporting.
Facebook's announcement comes
as former Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) and the Heritage Foundation are both working
with the company to investigate whether it has harbored liberal biases and
advise Facebook on "the best way to work with [conservative] groups moving
forward," according
to Axios.
While the American Civil
Liberties Union (ACLU) is also participating in an audit and working with
Facebook to ensure that minority voices are represented on the platform, there
was no indication that the impact on left-leaning independent media outlets was
also being examined.
As ThinkProgress reported on
Wednesday, "Facebook's bias study, according to Facebook, will not include
any liberals...Facebook did not answer questions from ThinkProgress about
why liberals were excluded from the process or whether this incentivizes
conservatives to continue to make false charges of bias."
The tech giant's decision
to work hand-in-hand with right-wingers like Kyl, while failing to afford
left-leaning sites a similar opportunity, exposes "how ill-equipped
Facebook is to deal with modern conservatism," wrote Libby Watson at Splinter
News.
After Gizmodo reported
in 2016 on the suppression of conservative media outlets like Breitbart
News in Facebook's "trending topics" feature, Watson wrote, the
right latched on to the notion that the company was biased against right-wing
reporting:
At Mark Zuckerberg's
congressional testimony,
Ted Cruz brought up the Gizmodo story and then proceeded to rattle
off an insane laundry list of persecution fantasy grievances: They "shut
down the Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day page," blocked "two dozen
Catholic pages," and, of course, banned [conservative video bloggers]
Diamond and Silk. Imagine. The problem with this criticism is that there
is a reason why Breitbart and Newsmax shouldn't
feature in any "news" section: They’re not trustworthy or legitimate
news sources...
Facebook is still, two
years later, struggling to counter baseless and hysterical whining about
censorship from the right, to the extent that it's now employing a conservative
lobbyist to "investigate" claims of bias at the company.
"The conservative
movement has done a remarkable job over the last half century to bellow and
bully its way into having its most ridiculous and reality-divorced concerns
taken seriously," Watson continued. "It lies about and distorts
everything: about tax cuts, about Benghazi and [Hillary Clinton's] emails,
about immigration, about healthcare, about Diamond and Silk. The further
Facebook descends down the path of letting that screaming white face of faux
outrage dictate how they run their platform, the harder it's going to be for
them to get away from them."
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