Whatever Mark Zuckerberg says about human community or his legacy, his company is acting in its own interests—and against the public good.
Facebook’s crushing blow to independent media arrived last fall in Slovakia, Cambodia, Guatemala, and three other nations.The social giant removed stories by these publishers from users’ news feeds, hiding them in a new, hard-to-find stream. These independent publishers reported that they lost as much as 80 percent of their audience during this experiment.Facebook doesn’t care. At least, it usually seems that way… the company is now going ahead with similar changes to its news feed globally. These changes will likely de-prioritize stories from professional publishers, and instead favor dispatches published by a user’s friends and family. .. Many American news organizations will see the sharp traffic declines their brethren in other nations experienced last year—unless they pay Facebook to include their stories in readers’ feeds.
.. People say they’re interested in a broad range of news from different political preferences, but Facebook knows they really want angry, outraged articles that confirm political prejudices... Publishers in Slovakia and in the United States may warn of damage to democracy if Facebook readers receive less news, but Facebook knows people will be perfectly happy—perfectly engaged—with more posts from friends and families instead.
.. I pledge to go to the gym more in 2018, but every morning when I wake up, my partner presents me with a plate of donuts and urges me to stay in bed and eat them. My revealed preferences show that I’m more interested in eating donuts than in exercising. But it’s pretty perverse that my partner is working to give me what I really crave, ignoring what I’ve clearly stated I aspire to... When people choose to subscribe to reliable news sources, they’re asking to go to the gym. With these newsfeed changes, Facebook threw out your gym shoes and subscribed you to a donut delivery service. Why do 2 billion people put up with a service that patronizingly reminds them that it’s designed for their well being, while it studiously ignores our stated preferences?.. I think the only way Facebook will listen to people’s expressed preferences is if people start building better alternatives... Right now, Facebook chooses what stories should top your news feed, optimizing for “engagement” and “time well spent.”..Instead of telling Facebook what it should do, people should build tools that let them view the world the way they choose. If regulators force Facebook and other platforms to police news quality, they’ll give more control to a platform that’s already demonstrated its disinterest editorial judgment. A better path would be to force all platforms to adopt two simple rules:
- Users own their own data, including the content they create and the web of relationships they’ve built online. And they can take this data with them from one platform to another, or delete it from an existing platform.
- Users can view platforms like Facebook through an aggregator, a tool that lets you read social media through your own filters, like Gobo.
.. it either needs to learn to listen to its users stated desires, or it needs to make room for platforms that do.
Facebook to Rank News Sources by Quality to Battle Misinformation
Tech giant will rely on user surveys of trustworthiness to try to preserve objectivity
The social-media giant will begin testing the effort next week by prioritizing news reports in its news feed from publications that users have rated in Facebook surveys as trustworthy, executives said Friday. The most “broadly trusted” publications—those trusted and recognized by a large cross-section of Facebook users—would get a boost in the news feed, while those that users rate low on trust would be penalized... This shift will result in news accounting for about 4% of the posts that appears in users’ feeds world-wide, down from the current 5%.. About 45% of U.S. adults get news from Facebook.. Mr. Zuckerberg said the change—which will be tested leading up to the 2018 U.S. midterm elections—is necessary to address the role of social media in amplifying sensationalism, misinformation and polarization. “That’s why it’s important that News Feed promotes high quality news that helps build a sense of common ground,” he wrote in his post... He compared the approach with Facebook’s reliance on third-party fact-checkers to determine whether or not an article is completely fabricated... On Friday, some publishers and media observers expressed concern about the ranking change, which, like other Facebook news-feed changes may have a significant and unpredictable impact on news publishers that rely on the site for traffic, including the Journal.
.. Facebook’s trust score would boost the news-feed presence of well-known and widely trusted publications even if users disagree with the content or aren’t avid readers.
Facebook Overhauls News Feed to Focus on What Friends and Family Share
I very much hope this isn’t just words. The core problem, IMO, is that content that makes us angry, anxious or jealous is a much better driver of clicks than content that makes us happy. I’m sure Facebook knows this. If they really mean it, they’ll accept that they will make less money as a result of this change. It would be the right decision in the long term, but the short term will hurt.
Zuckerberg’s Dilemma: When Facebook’s Success Is Bad for Society
Facebook’s chief has signaled he will do what it takes to curb the social network’s negative effects—but how far will he go?
.. In the face of pressure brought by a growing roster of Facebook investors and former executives, many of whom have publicly stated that Facebook is both psychologically addictive and harmful to democracy, the Facebook founder and chief executive has pledged to “fix” Facebook by doing several things, including “making sure that time spent on Facebook is time well spent.”.. he wants his company “to encourage meaningful social interactions,” adding that “time spent is not a goal by itself.”.. So here’s the multibillion-dollar question: Is he willing to sacrifice revenue for the well-being of Facebook’s two-billion-plus users?.. In June, he changed the company’s mission from “connecting” the world to bringing the world closer together. He said he used to think giving people a voice would make the world better on its own, “but our society is still divided. Now I believe we have a responsibility to do even more.”.. Facebook researchers surveyed the scientific literature and their own workand publicly acknowledged that while direct communication and sharing between individuals and small groups on Facebook can have positive effects, merely lurking and scrolling through others’ status updates makes people unhappy... the U.K.-based Royal Society for Public Health asked 1,500 young people to evaluate the five biggest social networks, to measure whether they are good or bad for mental health. The results showed all but one service had a negative effect on mental health... Facebook, Twitter , Snapchat and the Facebook-owned Instagram all pushed survey participants to contrast their lives with others, a phenomenon known as social comparison. The exception was YouTube, in part because the dynamic is usually one-to-many communication, with person-to-person socializing happening in comments... Social networks can also make us miserable by convincing us that whenever we’re away from our friends, we’re missing out on social bonding occurring among them, says Jacqueline Rifkin, a Ph.D. candidate at Duke University who collaborated on a study of the fear of missing out, or FOMO. The misery can kick in even if what we are experiencing—an awesome vacation, perhaps—is objectively better than what our friends are up to... Ms. Rifkin’s work indicates that FOMO isn’t about envy but something far more primal: If our kith and kin are bonding without us, we might soon find ourselves left out of the tribe... how much you use social media is at least as significant as how you use it... steps include things that Facebook itself believes will reduce engagement on the service, including hiding clickbait and fake news and promoting posts from friends... Facebook is built on the idea of bringing the world closer together, as its mission statement so boldly pronounces. The irony that Mr. Zuckerberg must confront is that the very means of that connection—what the company euphemistically calls engagement, but which experts say is more accurately described as addiction—appears to be detrimental to the humans whose thriving he seems earnestly to want to promote.