Abstract
The commercial success of Facebook is admirable, but what it means for journalism should worry us all, says a close observer
Facebook's Menlo Park headquarters in Silicon Valley is designed to feel like a technological Disneyland that its engineers will never want to leave. On the campus, between the warehouses of productivity, there's a kind of pixel-perfect strip mall of a candy store, burger bar and “analogue research lab”. The lab is actually a screen-printing room filled with an array of benches, drying racks and hundreds of hand-printed posters, churning out motivational propaganda for the whole campus with a kind of hipster craftsman aesthetic. “Done is better than perfect”, one says. “Stay focused and keep shipping”. And “Carthago delenda est”.
Carthage must be destroyed. When the Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg used this quote in a rousing speech to staff in 2013, the subject of his ire was Google Plus, though Google's attempt at a social network never presented a serious threat. And so who, or what, in Facebook's west coast capitalist, techno-libertarian view of the world, is the Carthaginian empire it is bent on destroying today?
Facebook would never say it set out to deliberately undermine the media industry. Yet it is, both through increasing domination of internet advertising revenue and control of a significant part of a critical distribution platform. It has created and defined an entirely new industry between media, communications and entertainment that we call “social media”, taking full advantage of the vast opportunity of unregulated business with a global audience.
It has built on previous internet successes. Anyone who has found themselves vacantly, compulsively scrolling its infinite newsfeed will understand its success. It triggers the primal dopamine response in our brain, rewarding every miniature digital discovery and compelling us to find the next one. And in Zuckerberg there's no hint of malevolence or megalomania; by all accounts he is a smart, talented and increasingly confident leader, albeit one who has benefited from being vacuum-sucked through a system built around white, wealthy, well-educated men who speak his language.
“Building a good economic engine is what allows all these other platform companies and advertisers and other partners to exist, and be a part of this ecosystem,” Zuckerberg told the author David Kirkpatrick in 2012. “What not being just a company means to me, is just not being just that – building something that actually makes a really big change in the world.”
Facebook “only 1 per cent done”
In his mind, Facebook's mission is still “only 1 per cent done”. It started as a platform for students in 2003 and opened to the public in 2006, encouraging them to share thoughts, opinions, photos and links. It is now worth $125bn, owns the photo app Instagram, the messaging app WhatsApp and the virtual reality hardware company Oculus, and is developing ambitious billion-dollar schemes to roll out cheap internet connections to the developing world using, among other things, solar-powered drones. “These things can't fail,” he told Fast Company in November 2015. “We need to get them to work in order to achieve the mission.”
And all of this is supported by a vast advertising business that, by the end of 2016, will have contributed $22.37billion of Facebook's predicted $23.31billion revenues, according to the research firm eMarketer. It will publish more adverts than any other destination in the world, with the exception of Google. The eMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson says Facebook is “still on an upward trajectory in nearly every area, from usage to total ad revenue to mobile ad revenue”.
Morgan Stanley recently estimated that 85 cents of every new dollar spent on online advertising in the US in the first quarter of 2016 would go to Facebook or Google. Part of Facebook's own success has been not just the scale at which it operates but the value it extracts from each of its users; each one of its 1.71billion active monthly users makes around $15.83 for the site.
Because users are logged in and willingly pour endless personal information about themselves into Facebook, the site can sell targeted advertising around them. News sites aren't able to compete with this level of sophisticated targeting, so combined with a continued fall in newspaper sales and print advertising revenue, they are now having to compete with technology companies for a share of digital ad revenue. The media agency ZenithOptimedia estimated the print advertising sales of UK newspapers at £1.7billion for 2015 – down from £4.2billion 10 years before. Digital ads totalled only £356million.
On August 3, 2016, the world's five biggest companies by market capitalisation were Apple, Alphabet (Google's parent company), Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook. That was unprecedented, even during the first dotcom boom. Silicon Valley dominates the world.
Facebook's stated mission is to make the world more open and connected – typically vague and aspirational Silicon Valley philoso-babble with an undercurrent of empire building. As with all tech companies that host content, it is legally required to define itself as a platform rather than a publisher so that it is not liable for the content that passes through its network.
In its June 2016 state of the media report, Pew Research Centre found that Americans felt social media was the second most “helpful” news source after cable TV, though it was the primary source for those aged 18–24. Facebook was far and away the most popular site for sharing news, it found. “Ten years ago there was a degree of anxiety about ownership of the media,” said Jesse Holcomb, Pew's associate director of research. “Those anxieties have been replaced by a new anxiety over the idea of control. Publishers were once more vertically integrated, from the production of knowledge to its distribution. Increasingly companies like Facebook are playing a key role in distribution, and now even creeping into editorial roles that had been that last bastion of the core identity of the journalistic profession. That phenomenon is at the heart of this journalistic culture anxiety right now.”
Technology companies already exert significant pressure over the industry press. Apple is the standard bearer for selective press access, inviting only favourable, preferred journalists to key events. Does that show the kind of maturity and corporate social responsibility we should be able to demand of the world's richest company? Apple is another company, along with Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter, controlling its own aggregated news product, Apple News. It aggregates multiple news publications into one place, much like Facebook. Both negate the need for those publications to own apps or sites.
Those employed in the technology industry are well paid, in awe of their cool employers and committed to so many non-disclosure agreements that any unofficial insight into these companies is rare. The kimono was briefly opened in May 2016 by a small group of journalists employed on a contractual basis to run Trending Topics, a small list of current popular news stories you'd be forgiven for missing on the side of Facebook's site.
The journalists told the tech news site Gizmodo they were instructed to suppress conservative news sources. The selection of stories reflected the bias of individual editors. In other words, Facebook's news is editorialised and not solely determined entirely by algorithm. The story was a major frustration for Facebook, which was forced to try and placate conservative news figures it invited to its impressive headquarters. But it undermined a key position of Facebook's – that it is a neutral platform without any editorial sensibility, while also demonstrating that no product or service designed and managed by humans can be neutral. Even an algorithm is built in the shape of its designer.
Ethical editorial problems
Some of the emerging ethical editorial problems faced by the site would challenge even an established and confident news organisation. And they are unprecedented. Moderating live and pre-recorded videos of extreme violence and murder, for example; Diamond Reynolds livestreamed the aftermath of a Minnesota policeman killing her fiance Philando Castile beside her in their car on July 6, 2016, a shooting that could never have gained support and notoriety among the public had it not been so widely shared on the site. Yet one month later, in a standoff between a young woman, Korryn Gaines, and police in Baltimore, Facebook granted a police request to shut down her account, blocking access to videos she was posting.
In its curation of the news too, it is not enough to present a self-reinforcing bubble of more of the news we want to see. It becomes unlikely, and then impossible, that we see a different perspective or a view with which we might disagree. The MySociety co-founder Tom Steinberg wrote of this “filter bubble” just after the Brexit vote, when he could find no one on his network who had voted leave. “The key people in social media companies, people who already know that this is a problem more clearly than any of us do, those people have to step up and be brave and lead,” he wrote, a few days after the vote.
The Wall Street Journal explored this filter bubble from the other side of the Atlantic in its “Blue feed, red feed” graphic, which showed how Clinton and Trump supporters would have entirely different, polarised versions of Facebook's newsfeed. Without debate and healthy alternative perspectives, how can there really be a meaningful discussion about issues of immense national interest? And is it possible that Facebook influenced the result of the Brexit vote?
Facebook's newsfeed encourages fast, voluminous but superficial engagement – a like or a share that endorses only the idea of the headline, because the newsfeed offers no incentive to wait, click through and actually read a news story to the end. The newsfeed is cluttered and lacks context or fact-checking, mixing spurious stories and pictures with family photos and actual journalism. On August 3, 2016 it made a small gesture towards cleaning this up, tweaking its algorithm to cut back on clickbait – poorly written headlines on low quality stories surrounded by dozens of ads. But it still has a long way to go.
Facebook speaks little publicly about its editorial policies and how it curates its newsfeed. It is likely that protecting journalism is not a priority for Facebook, where engineers hold the power and the solution is nearly always sought through technology. Yet the company will come under increasing pressure to articulate its approach to these complex editorial questions, and needs not only to work with news organisations behind the scenes, but in public too.
Facebook's disruption of established businesses in a competitive open market is entirely fair. Its modest company of just 15,000 employees has created a lean, focused and efficient machine for productivity and growth, constantly iterating and exploring new products and improvements. It is a mighty competitor. But journalism is more than just a business – it has a crucial and under-acknowledged social purpose that in this era of instability, isolationist politics and barely scrutinised power and wealth is more important than ever.
