STATE OF THE ART
Facebook is the world’s most influential source of news.
That’s true according to every available measure of size — the billion-plus people who devour its News Feed every day, the cargo ships of profit it keeps raking in, and the tsunami of online traffic it sends to other news sites.
But Facebook has also acquired a more subtle power to shape the wider news business. Across the industry, reporters, editors and media executives now look to Facebook the same way nesting baby chicks look to their engorged mother — as the source of all knowledge and nourishment, the model for how to behave in this scary new-media world. Case in point: The New York Times, among others, recently began an initiative to broadcast live video. Why do you suppose that might be? Yup, the F word. The deal includes payments from Facebook to news outlets, including The Times.
Yet few Americans think of Facebook as a powerful media organisation, one that can alter events in the real world. When blowhards rant about the mainstream media, they do not usually mean Facebook, the mainstreamiest of all social networks. That’s because Facebook operates under a veneer of empiricism. Many people believe that what you see on Facebook represents some kind of data-mined objective truth unmolested by the subjective attitudes of fair-and-balanced human beings.
None of that is true. This week, Facebook rushed to deny a report in Gizmodo that said the team in charge of its “trending” news list routinely suppressed conservative points of view. Last month, Gizmodo also reported that Facebook employees asked Mark Zuckerberg, the social network’s chief executive, if the company had a responsibility to “help prevent President Trump in 2017.” Facebook denied it would ever try to manipulate elections.
Even if you believe that Facebook isn’t monkeying with the trending list or actively trying to swing the vote, the reports serve as timely reminders of the everincreasing potential dangers of Facebook’s hold on the news. That drew the attention of Senator John Thune, the Republican of South Dakota who heads the Senate’s Commerce Committee, who sent a letter on Tuesday asking . Zuckerberg to explain how Facebook polices bias.
The question isn’t whether Facebook has outsize power to shape the world — of course it does, and of course you should worry about that power. If it wanted to, Facebook could try to sway elections, favour certain policies, or just make you feel a certain way about the world, as it once proved it could do in an experiment devised to measure how emotions spread online.
There is no evidence Facebook is doing anything so alarming now. The danger is nevertheless real. The biggest worry is that Facebook doesn’t seem to recognise its own power, and doesn’t think of itself as a news organisation with a welldeveloped sense of institutional ethics and responsibility, or even a potential for bias. Neither does its audience, which might believe that Facebook is immune to bias because it is run by computers.
That myth should die. It’s true that beyond the Trending box, most of the stories Facebook presents to you are selected by its algorithms, but those algorithms are as infused with bias as any other human editorial decision.