The
Facebook Armageddon
The social
network’s increasing threat to journalism
By Mathew
Ingram
WINTER 2018
Illustration by Diego Patiño
At some
point over the past decade, Facebook stopped being a mostly harmless social
network filled with baby photos and became one of the most powerful forces in
media—with more than 2 billion users every month and a growing lock on the ad
revenue that used to underpin most of the media industry. When it comes to
threats to journalism, in other words, Facebook qualifies as one, whether it
wants to admit it or not.
Facebook’s
relationship with the media has been a classic Faustian bargain: News outlets
want to reach those 2 billion users, so they put as much of their content as
they can on the network. Some of them are favored by the company’s all-powerful
(and completely mysterious) algorithm, giving them access to a wider audience
to pitch for subscriptions or the pennies worth of ad revenue they receive from
the platform.
But while
many media outlets continue to pander to Facebook, even some of the
digital-media entities that have catered to the company seem to be struggling.
Mashable, which laid off much of its news staff to focus on video for Facebook,
is being acquired by Ziff Davis for 20 percent of what it was valued at a year
ago, and BuzzFeed reportedly missed its revenue targets for 2017 and had to lay
off a number of editorial staff.
Facebook
continues to move the goalposts when it comes to how the News Feed algorithm
works. In January, the company said that it would be de-emphasizing posts from
media outlets in favor of “meaningful interactions” between users, and
suggested this could result in a significant decline in traffic for some
publishers.
The fact
that even Facebook’s closest media partners like BuzzFeed are struggling
financially highlights the most obvious
threat: Since many media companies still rely on advertising revenue to
support their journalism, Facebook’s increasing dominance of that industry
poses an existential threat to their business models.
According
to a recent estimate by media investment firm GroupM, Google and Facebook will
account for close to 85 percent of the global digital ad market this year and
will take most of the growth in that market—meaning other players will shrink.
“This is exceedingly bad news for the balance of the digital publisher
ecosystem,” the firm reported.
While it
may be tempting to see Facebook as an evil overlord determined to crush media
companies and journalists under its boots, most media companies find themselves
in this predicament because they failed to adapt quickly enough, so in a sense
they only have themselves to blame.
“Did God
give us that (advertising) revenue? No,” says CUNY journalism professor Jeff
Jarvis. “It wasn’t our money, it was our customers’ money, and Facebook and
Google came along and offered them a better deal.” The problem, says Jarvis,
whose News Integrity Initiative counts Facebook as a donor, is that “we didn’t
change our business models. We insist on maintaining the mass-media business
model, and that’s more of a problem than social media.”
Nobody
believes Mark Zuckerberg woke up one morning and decided to destroy the media
industry. His company’s behavior is a lot more like an elephant accidentally
stepping on an ant—something that has happened while Facebook has gone about
its business.
“Facebook
is a threat not necessarily because it’s evil but because it does what it does
very well, which is to target people for advertisers,” says Martin Nisenholtz,
former head of digital strategy at The New York Times. The question, he says,
is “has it become so dominant now that it’s become essentially a monopoly, and
if so what should publishers do about it?”
AS WELL-MEANING
AS IT MAY BE, there’s no question Facebook’s dominance of social distribution,
and the power it gives the company to command attention, represents a direct
threat to media companies. It’s about control.
As digital
advertising continues to decline as a source of revenue thanks to Google and
Facebook, many media companies are having to rely increasingly on
subscriptions. But the readers they want to reach are all on Facebook consuming
content for free.
Places like
The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal have the kinds of international
brands that will allow them to continue to be advertising destinations and also
get the lion’s share of subscriptions. But where does that leave mid-market
papers that don’t have the scale or the reach?
Most media companies find themselves in this
predicament because they failed to adapt quickly enough, so in a sense they
only have themselves to blame.
“The brutal truth for publishers is that,
absent the cost structure and differentiation necessary to create a sustainable
destination site that users visit directly, they have no choice but to bend to
Facebook’s wishes,” technology analyst Ben Thompson wrote in his newsletter,
Stratechery. “Given how inexpensive it is to produce content on the internet, someone
else is more than willing to take your share of attention.”
As a
result, publishers risk becoming commodity suppliers to Facebook. And not only
are commodity suppliers unable to demand very much in the form of pay, but they
can also be replaced easily—or asked to pay for the right to reach the users
they originally reached for free.
Either way,
as Facebook increases its control, “they’ll decide which brands they are going
to elevate and which they will filter out,” says Emily Bell, director of the
Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia. “There’s an ethical view that
this is a terrible state of affairs, since it means that Facebook effectively
decides which media outlets survive and which don’t.”
Author and
journalism professor Dan Gillmor recently described a future in which “we will
be living in the ecosystem of a company that has repeatedly demonstrated its
untrustworthiness, an enterprise that would become the primary newsstand for
journalism and would be free to pick the winners via special deals with media
people and tweaks of its opaque algorithms. If this is the future, we are truly
screwed.”
IN ADDITION
TO THE ECONOMIC THREAT it represents to media companies, Facebook also arguably
poses a threat to journalism itself. Into this bucket we can throw things like
fake news and misinformation, which works primarily because Facebook focuses on
engagement—time spent, clicks, and sharing—rather than quality or value.
In many
ways, sociologists say, Facebook is a machine designed to encourage
confirmation bias, which is the human desire to believe things that confirm our
existing beliefs, even if they are untrue. As a former Facebook product manager
wrote in a Facebook post: “The news feed optimizes for engagement, [and]
bullshit is highly engaging.”
Facebook
has announced a number of attempts to fix its misinformation problem, including
a fact checking project that adds the “disputed” tag to stories that have been
flagged by partners. But those efforts have been stymied by the fact that some
of Facebook’s problems appear to be baked into the platform (and into the
company’s relentlessly efficient DNA).
Late last
year, Facebook announced that it was dropping the “disputed” tag because it
proved to be ineffective in stopping people from sharing misinformation, and in
fact may have actually achieved the opposite goal, by reinforcing people’s
erroneous beliefs about certain topics.
Given the
platform’s repeated misunderstanding of its role in the information ecosystem,
some believe that Facebook may simply not be a great place for journalism to
live. Digital-journalism veteran David Cohn has argued that the network’s main
purpose is not information so much as it is identity, and the construction by
users of a public identity that matches the group they wish to belong to. This
is why fake news is so powerful.
“The
headline isn’t meant to inform somebody about the world,” wrote Cohn, a senior
director at Advance Publications, which owns Condé Nast and Reddit. “The
headline is a tool to be used by a person to inform others about who they are.
‘This is me,’ they say when they share that headline. ‘This is what I believe.
This shows what tribe I belong to.’ It is virtue signaling.”
Twitter
suffers from a similar problem, in the sense that many users seem to see their
posts as a way of displaying (or arguing for) their beliefs rather than a way
of exchanging verifiable news. But Facebook’s role in the spread of
misinformation is orders of magnitude larger than Twitter’s: 2 billion monthly
users versus 330 million.
FACEBOOK WATCHERS, including some former and
current employees, say many of the company’s journalism problems are
exacerbated by the fact that the news simply isn’t a core focus for the
company, and likely never will be.
In recent
years, as heat on the company has risen, Facebook has tried to pretend that
isn’t the case. Zuckerberg has gone from saying that it was “a crazy idea” to
suggest fake news on the network affected the US election to admitting that
Facebook does play a role in the dissemination of misinformation, and that
Russian troll factories used the platform in an attempt to meddle with the
election.
If you move fast and break democracy, or move
fast and break journalism, how do you measure the impact of that—and how do you
go about trying to fix it?
Facebook has rolled out a range of
well-meaning journalistic efforts, including its partnership with fact-checking
organizations, the Facebook Journalism Project—which is aimed at helping
newsrooms get more digitally savvy—and the News Integrity Initiative, which
Jarvis helped launch last year with funding from Facebook and others.
But these
tend to come off looking more like public relations vehicles, as the company
tries to stay ahead of federal regulators and others who might want to impose
legal restrictions on what it can and cannot do.
“Throwing
money at things is a Band-Aid,” says a former staffer. “They’re not grappling
with the real problems their dominance is causing. I left because it became
frustrating to know that they weren’t taking seriously the impact they were
having on journalism and the news.”
IT’S NOT
THAT FACEBOOK DOESN’T CARE about things like fake news, it’s that it doesn’t
care enough. And the reason why is the same as it is for Google (which has a
number of its own well-meaning efforts aimed at journalism)—because ultimately
those issues don’t affect the central business of the company, which is to
connect everyone on the planet and generate as much advertising revenue as
humanly possible.
Former
Facebook employees say the engineering-driven, “move fast and break things”
approach worked when the company was smaller but now gets in the way of
understanding the societal problems it faces. It’s one thing to break a
product, but if you move fast and break democracy, or move fast and break
journalism, how do you measure the impact of that—and how do you go about
trying to fix it?
“I think
there’s a possibility that they just don’t know what to do” about these larger
problems, says Nisenholtz. “I think there’s a chance they don’t have the people
in their organization or the DNA to even understand what is going on or what to
do about it. I’m fundamentally optimistic about Facebook’s desire to help, but
I’m not as optimistic about its ability to help.”
Jarvis,
however, believes Facebook does care, and is prepared to devote its
considerable weight to solving the problem. “I’ve talked to Chris Cox, the head
of product at Facebook, and I believe he cares deeply about news. I think Mark
Zuckerberg cares. We have to reinvent journalism, and we should be doing it in
partnership with Facebook and Google because they’re a lot fucking smarter
about it than we are.”
But it’s
not the smarts of the Facebook employee that anyone doubts. It’s whether this
company, literally engineered to do one thing incredibly well, can reprogram
itself to care about something—journalism—it knows very little about.
AS MUCH OF
A THREAT AS FACEBOOK CURRENTLY REPRESENTS for the media industry, it could get
much worse. The company could, for instance, continue to vacuum up even more of
the advertising market to the point where ads are no longer a viable revenue
source for media companies at all. For some, that would mean going from ads
contributing as much as 60 percent of revenue to zero.
“There are
parts of the media business model that are just broken, like the advertising
business—the distribution bottleneck is gone,” says Bell. “What the new
journalistic business looks like, that can not just survive but thrive in this
new world, we haven’t really figured it out yet.”
Could
advertising disappear completely as a viable revenue source? Jason Kint of
Digital Content Next, a lobby group that includes some of the largest media
brands in the country, says he sees Google and Facebook continuing to dominate
“programmatic” or automated advertising. But he believes there is still the
potential for other forms of advertising—high-value display, for example—to
continue generating revenue for media companies.
But even
those new possibilities are likely to hit the Facebook algorithmic wall.
“Either the advertising business as we know it goes away, or you survive as a
media outlet because you are in Facebook’s favor, either algorithmically or
otherwise,” says one veteran journalist, who didn’t want his name used because
he has to work with Facebook. “There’s no precedent in terms of the size and
dominance of it as a media entity, and no one has any idea what to do about it.
We are in uncharted territory here.”
As bad as
scraping for advertising revenue might be, there’s another way the Facebook
threat could actually get worse: Instead of continuing to be a primary platform
for news companies and trying to strike relationships with them, the company
could decide to simply wash its hands of news entirely, either because it isn’t
generating enough revenue, or because it has become too much of a political
headache.
For
Facebook, it has to be distracting to devote so much of its time and energy to
congressional sub committees or European Union directives related to “fake
news” and Russian trolls. And for all its attempts to help media companies with
revenue sharing and fact-checking and other initiatives, it inevitably gets
criticized for not doing enough.
In a larger
sense, news—meaning journalistic stories produced by credible publishers—likely
represents a small proportion of the content that appears on Facebook, most of
which is composed of family photos or posts about friends and co-workers. News
may encourage engagement, but is it worth the hassle?
Facebook’s
decision in January to de-emphasize publisher links in the News Feed is a step
away from news, a move some have argued might actually be good for media
companies. An even bigger move would be a split News Feed, where the majority
of content in the main feed is related to personal relationships, and a
separate feed includes traditional news articles from mainstream outlets.
We got a
glimpse of what that might look like earlier this year, when Facebook tested a
split feed in several Asian and Eastern European countries. News outlets who
work in those countries said their reach on the social network fell by as much
as 60 percent overnight.
Ironically,
some criticized Facebook for these experiments because they said the company
was messing around with what has become a key source of news for people in
struggling democracies like Cambodia, where traditional media is untrustworthy.
In many ways, this reinforced the power that Facebook has developed over news
consumption, not just in the US but around the world.
Could they
decide just to give up on news, or relegate it to the sidelines? “I feel like
there’s a real chance that they might just decide it’s too much trouble, too
much of a PR mess, and they’re not even making that much money from it to begin
with,” says one former staffer. “But the genie is kind of out of the bottle
now. I’m not sure they can go back at this point.”
TO REALLY COME TO GRIPS with what its size and
influence have wrought both in journalism and society at large, Facebook is
going to have to not only change its outlook but also its culture. But is that
even possible at this stage? Can a company that became a $500 billion colossus
by thinking in one way start to think in a different way?
“Facebook
is going to be an important institution, even if it decides it doesn’t want to
actually produce journalism,” says Bell. “If it’s here to stay, it needs to be
part of figuring this problem out. My worry is that they only see things in
market terms, so it’s all about market share. And my biggest fear is that they
just sort of give up and decide it’s just not part of their core vision.”
After all,
the company didn’t set out to kill anything, including the media industry, says
one former staffer. “Zuck is just a very competitive guy, and he wanted to
build the largest company he could. And now they’ve done it—he’s won. But they
fundamentally don’t know how to deal with it.”
In a way,
Facebook is like a band of revolutionaries who don’t know what to do once they
manage to topple the dictator and actually become the government. And we are
all living in the world that they have created for us, whether we like it or
not.
A TIMELINE
OF TURMOIL
While
Facebook has become enormously influential as a distributor of news, that sway
hasn’t come without pain. In the past decade, the company has been criticized
for helping to spread scams, hoaxes, and fake news, all while becoming one of
the biggest media companies on the planet.
September 2006: The hated news stream
Facebook
launches the News Feed. A blog post describes it as a stream that “highlights
what’s happening in your social circles on Facebook.” Many users hate it.
September
2011: The reader that wasn’t
Facebook
launches its “social news reader” apps with The Washington Post and The
Guardian. But the algorithm is later changed so many users don’t see them.
January
2012: Advertising is introduced
The company
starts showing advertising inside the News Feed. That year, Facebook’s ad
revenue is $4 billion. By 2016 it would hit almost $27 billion.
December
2013: A newspaper of one’s own
Mark
Zuckerberg says he wants to make the News Feed “the best personalized newspaper
in the world.” In 2014 the company launches a standalone app called Paper.
January
2015: Scam alert, version 1.0
After
criticism of hoaxes and scams, Facebook says it will crack down, but says “we
are not reviewing content and making a determination on its accuracy.”
May 2015:
Arrival of instant articles
Facebook
launches Instant Articles, a feature that makes mobile pages load faster.
Initial launch partners include BuzzFeed, The New York Times, and National
Geographic.
May 2016:
Conservative controversy
Gizmodo
reports that Facebook’s “trending topics” team routinely inserts or removes
news articles from the section, and that it does so with conservative news
sites in particular.
November
2016: The election effect
Zuckerberg
says the idea that fake news affected the US election is “crazy.” But a month
later Facebook says it will work with users and third-party verification
services to identify fake articles.
April 2017:
In the DC spotlight
Facebook
admits that Russian government agents used fake accounts to influence the US
election, and later appears before Congress after admitting Russian trolls
bought political ads.
January 2018: Personal over political
Facebook
announces a change to the News Feed to prioritize personal posts over news
content, and warns publishers their traffic from the social network will likely
decrease.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário