Friday, January 12, 2018 ~ EDITORIAL ~ by Mary P Brooke: Facebook now oppressing journalism news feeds
The ‘in your face’ social media giant that is Facebook claims to have improved social relations for people around the world. Yet you can as easily find critique all over the Web about the social isolation and mental-emotional challenges that intensive use of social media contributes to, including suicide in response to cyber-bullying.
Social media users can easily lose perspective. What? You’re not my Friend on Facebook or didn’t Like my latest cute-puppy photo? Oh no, you’ve crashed my world!
Disturbing is this week’s Facebook announcement that they have shifted their algorithms to pull personal posts (people who they unilaterally determine that you ‘know’) to the top of your Facebook feed, with the deliberate intention of disprupting the dominance of legitimate news streams and business feeds. While they make this sound like a favour to all the individual users of their platform — saying it will reduce the incidence of fake news — what it really smacks of is the same ol’ aggressive Facebook business dominance against others whom they consider a threat. Once you’re that big, sometimes the only way to go is down.
It wasn’t too long ago that Facebook blurted out that it wasn’t in the news publishing business, that it only provided a platform for others to post whatever they want. This was in the aftermath of the proliferation of ‘fake news’ deemed to have interfered with the US presidential election in 2016 across many major social media platforms.
Facebook said at the time they didn’t want to take the responsibility for filtering, implying it would be akin to censorship on the free and open Web. But that seems to have been a ploy to stall for time until they could figure out a way to further usurp the journalism-based news industry which has, yep, also used the invasive but free Facebook platform to enable their reach. Facebook is still just a glorified tech-tool, not a producer of original journalism. They will be the first to agree that they are not a news-creator. If you care about getting real news (i.e. facts gathered by way of principled journalism), you won’t rely on Facebook to manage that for you. If you continue on Facebook, you may wish to Friend, Like and follow the local and regional news feeds that you still want to see prominently represented in your interface.
All things start with a basic spark of an idea and grow from there. The world knows the history of Zuckerberg and Facebook … it was started to gain him a social life on his university campus at the time, and then to be the biggest and best social media interface, apparently at all costs. Facebook started in a take-no-prisoners manner that is clearly intended to continue.
Most people take part in social media, and as such have voluntarily handed over any semblance of boundary and privacy as they pour their hearts and special photos into faceless servers, out there forever. Handing over your children’s photos to the world… will this come back to bite them later?
Yes, thousands of news producers around the world utilize a Facebook platform and don’t necessarily pay out of pocket for it. “Free and always will be” says Facebook. They win big time by repackaging user data to continue invading our privacy and building their massive fortune. Even Zuckerberg himself says it’s nearly impossible to find new ways to spend what he has amassed.
No one minds being or wanting to be wealthy. We all say we’d love to will a million bucks in the lottery or see a business succeed to glorious heights. Call this old fashioned if you like — but essentially taking away people’s identity and repackaging it for shareholder gain (yeah, yeah, you signed a waiver when you joined Facebook) is not a kind way to get there.
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