Facebook

Facebook has been in the news recently – that’s an understatement. The recent travails the tech giant has undergone are well-chronicalled, and don’t need repeating here.

But some were identifying the downside of Facebook’s size some time ago. Here is what Ross Douthat shared almost two years ago in his piece: “Facebook’s Subtle Empire:”

IN one story people tell about the news media, we have moved from an era of consolidation and authority to an era of fragmentation and diversity. Once there were three major television networks, and everyone believed what Walter Cronkite handed down from Sinai. Then came cable TV and the talk radio boom, and suddenly people could seek out ideologically congenial sources and tune out the old mass-culture authorities. Then finally the Internet smashed the remaining media monopolies, scattered news readers to the online winds, and opened an age of purely individualized news consumption.

How compelling is this story? It depends on what you see when you look at Facebook.

In one light, Facebook is a powerful force driving fragmentation and nicheification. It gives its users news from countless outlets, tailored to their individual proclivities. It allows those users to be news purveyors in their own right, playing Cronkite every time they share stories with their “friends.” And it offers a platform to anyone, from any background or perspective, looking to build an audience from scratch.

But seen in another light, Facebook represents a new era of media consolidation, a return of centralized authority over how people get their news. From this perspective, Mark Zuckerberg’s empire has become an immensely powerful media organization in its own right, albeit one that effectively subcontracts actual news gathering to other entities (this newspaper included). And its potential influence is amplified by the fact that this Cronkite-esque role is concealed by Facebook’s self-definition as “just” a social hub.

These two competing understandings have collided in the last few weeks, after it was revealed that Facebook’s list of “trending topics” is curated by a group of toiling journalists, not just an impersonal algorithm, and after a former curator alleged that decisions about which stories “trend” are biased against conservative perspectives.

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