That CNN article they quote is nothing more than CNN disliking that Youtube is challenging them in viewers and ad money. CNN isn't exactly the bastion of legitimacy and journalistic standards either. They're also trying to take down true left wing media like Jimmy Dore, painting him as a 'conspiracy theorist' for not being certain about the Syrian gas attacks before the OPCW was even there, as real journalists should do -- not just take talking points from the Pentagon. Cenk Uygur had to step in on TYT and denounce that stupid CNN article advocating for censorship and bring Jimmy out of that hole.
This is true. But objectively Facebook's practices were extraordinarily harmful in hindsight. Facebook's paid "advertising" that could target super-fine demographics basically allowed for the weaponization of Fake News, dropping the munitions into environments that other observers weren't even seeing. So unverified garbage that even FOX wouldn't run ended up on a lot of voters' front pages.
The ability to run your "story" on Facebook as a paid ad basically pulled an end around on society's idea of a shared truth. It wasn't the only tool to that effect, maybe not even the most damaging, but it was a disaster nonetheless.
One counterexample doesn't prove anything, and Doctorow is barely even a relevant example. It's journalists who feel most threatened by Facebook, as they see their subscriber base - and thus their own income opportunities - dwindling. Pseudo-journalist commentators even more so. Once they might have looked to Facebook as a possible ally, a channel through which they could ply their profession, but increasingly (to answer another respondent) they see Facebook purely as a threat. Whether consciously or not, they're highly motivated to magnify everything negative about a rival and never ever write about anything positive.
The incentives for bloggers are similar, though lesser. The more income they derive from ads on their site, the more they see that ad revenue decreasing, the more similar their motivations become to those of the professional media. I'm sure Doctorow makes a bit from pushing products on Boing Boing, but most of his (and other contributors') income comes from other sources and the audience there was always rather Facebook-averse since forever so Facebook's (or Google's) increasing dominance of the ad space has probably not made a dent for them overall.
The real point, though, is that one can't point to self interest as a reason for criticizing Google and pretend that it plays no part in why people criticize Facebook. That's just favoring the devil you're in bed with over the one you're not.
Just want to add: journalists still hold moral high ground.
FB wants to/already has sucked away money and locked in content providers by making themselves the de facto platform, when previously the platform was just "the Internet".
People like to accuse MS and Apple for "embrace, extend, extinguish" tactics, but FB straight up did it for real, it's just they did it to content providers instead of developers and end-users.
Media companies now see the error in their ways and I'm honestly happy for them to attack FB.
Yes, I said "all" but it was clearly hyperbole. Most people would interpret "journalists who are all..." the same way as "all journalists who are..." or treat "all" as an intensifier rather than a qualifier. "He was all up in my face" doesn't mean he put his entire body in my face. But hey, if you want to be super-literal for the sake of being contrary I guess that's your problem. The fact remains that what's true for Boing Boing is not necessarily true for CNN, and that there's adequate reason to believe self-interest affects CNN's coverage here.
That doesn't really make sense. Facebook is a large advertising platform for journalists and media that have existed for a very long time. It's not exactly a space for creators like Youtube.
> Facebook is a large advertising platform for journalists and media
That's outdated thinking; see my response to Mononokay. As much as a year ago, journalists might have seen it that way. What has changed, and why the tone has changed, is that almost no journalists today see Facebook as anything but a competitor. It doesn't even matter if they were right then or are right now, or both, or neither. That's just the zeitgeist.
