Nevada Press Association The best in Nevada journalism since 1924
Facebook — can’t live with it, can’t live without it.
The social media platform’s recent announcement that it would be de-emphasizing news and returning to its roots of sharing posts among friends and family sent some shivers through news publishers large and small, but it shouldn’t have. If your strategy was to rely on Facebook to drive traffic, then you were approaching the problem from the wrong angle.
Here’s how Mark Zuckerberg described the change in Facebook’s algorithm for its “news” feed.
We built Facebook to help people stay connected and bring us closer together with the people that matter to us. That’s why we’ve always put friends and family at the core of the experience. Research shows that strengthening our relationships improves our well-being and happiness.
But recently we’ve gotten feedback from our community that public content — posts from businesses, brands and media — is crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other
It’s all part of Facebook’s reaction to being forced to grow up. The responsibility that comes with being a provider of news — something newspapers have recognized, accepted and embraced since the First Amendment was ratified — means that you have a social contract not just with the individuals being served but with civilized society.
Here’s a link to a quite sensible column by Ned Berke on how small publishers should react to Facebook’s changes.
As he writes:
Publishers of all sizes have to justify their time on the platform, now more than ever. In years past, the fast and relatively easy traffic was enough. But as their time spent on the platform increased, their returns diminish with every algorithm update.
In other words, like anything else, there’s no golden pot at the end of the rainbow. You still need strategies and solid content for all your platforms. Otherwise, why are you doing it?
The adoption of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, specifically Section 230 of Title 47, was in some ways the opening of the Wild West of the internet, when it declared that “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”
It was a bewildering and, at least for a time, unburdening revelation for people like me who had worked at newspapers for many years. Our role as gatekeepers didn’t apply online. People could be as defamatory, deceitful and irresponsible as they wanted but — as long as it was on the internet — we could pass it along without fear of being sued for libel.
This was the opposite of our responsibilities in print. If a person wrote a letter to the editor, and we published it, we were just as culpable — often more so, because we were distributing it to many people. But that same letter published in reader comments on our web site, available to millions, was not our fault.
That’s how free speech works, we thought. The marketplace of ideas will thrive, we thought.
Twenty years later, we find that Facebook has 2 billion users and Google process 40,000 searches each second of the day. People can’t distinguish between fiction and fact, and they don’t know the source of the “news” they’re reading. Facebook, Google and everybody else are free of the shackles of truth and responsibility — even when their platforms are being gamed for money, influence and pure spite.
So, no, it’s no surprise that Facebook would back away from the suggestion it is providing “news” so that it can focus on gossip. In the long run, that path will be smoother and less consequential.
Many readers of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” have long interpreted it as a celebration of individualism and decisiveness, because the narrator concludes that taking the less-traveled path “made all the difference.” The poem is, instead, a rumination on the regrets of the road not taken — what possibilities might have lain there, he’ll never know.
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
Publishers may wish they hadn’t ceded control over their distribution to Facebook, but they’ll probably never know what they would have found down that other path.