> It arguably has the influence to swing elections and shape public discourse
This used to be a power that was held only by a small oligopoly of mass media corporations.
> And it has always been the press' job to hold powerful figures and companies accountable to the public.
The question is, "who watches the watchers?".
Prior to the explosion of the internet, the narrative consensus established by the mass media was the truth, as far as most people knew. The voice of Walter Cronkite might have well been the voice of God. The press, itself, was seldom held accountable to the public, save from a few propagandists or, at best, contrarians like Noam Chomsky who usually had some particular ideological axe to grind and some biases of their own. (Chomsky himself was very self-aware about his place in the world at the time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent)
Now we live in a world where there are a million Noam Chomskys for each Walter Cronkite, and the Cronkites are getting scared. Instead of the seemingly benign and well-hidden biases of the mainstream media, we are bombarded with obvious, radicalized biases from a plethora of outlets, all with varying levels of honesty.
> Facebook has been, especially over the past few years, at best an amoral actor. That has to be news. It has to be.
Facebook built a platform for disseminating media. It's a platform where propaganda can be disseminated to people at a very high level of granularity and precision. It's a platform that lives in a place where national borders have less meaning, enabling bad actors to cross these borders. Facebook talks about making the world more open and connected. It turns out that the world is a terrible place and there were good reasons to be closed off and disconnected from certain parts of it!
The issues discussed above arise because Facebook optimized for easily measured and monetized things like engagement, and discovered some unintended consequences, so now they're being called on to address those consequences. Maybe they and other social media companies should block fake news, or incitements to violence, or political advertising, or female-presenting nipples, or whatever. The problem is, Facebook is a monopoly, and if you have a mass media monopoly acting as the arbiter of truth and social harm, you've just made matters much, much, much worse. This solution also doesn't appease the legacy mass media, which themselves used to be the arbiters of truth, and are loath to relinquish that power to some nerds in San Francisco.
This used to be a power that was held only by a small oligopoly of mass media corporations.
> And it has always been the press' job to hold powerful figures and companies accountable to the public.
The question is, "who watches the watchers?".
Prior to the explosion of the internet, the narrative consensus established by the mass media was the truth, as far as most people knew. The voice of Walter Cronkite might have well been the voice of God. The press, itself, was seldom held accountable to the public, save from a few propagandists or, at best, contrarians like Noam Chomsky who usually had some particular ideological axe to grind and some biases of their own. (Chomsky himself was very self-aware about his place in the world at the time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent)
Now we live in a world where there are a million Noam Chomskys for each Walter Cronkite, and the Cronkites are getting scared. Instead of the seemingly benign and well-hidden biases of the mainstream media, we are bombarded with obvious, radicalized biases from a plethora of outlets, all with varying levels of honesty.
> Facebook has been, especially over the past few years, at best an amoral actor. That has to be news. It has to be.
Facebook built a platform for disseminating media. It's a platform where propaganda can be disseminated to people at a very high level of granularity and precision. It's a platform that lives in a place where national borders have less meaning, enabling bad actors to cross these borders. Facebook talks about making the world more open and connected. It turns out that the world is a terrible place and there were good reasons to be closed off and disconnected from certain parts of it!
The issues discussed above arise because Facebook optimized for easily measured and monetized things like engagement, and discovered some unintended consequences, so now they're being called on to address those consequences. Maybe they and other social media companies should block fake news, or incitements to violence, or political advertising, or female-presenting nipples, or whatever. The problem is, Facebook is a monopoly, and if you have a mass media monopoly acting as the arbiter of truth and social harm, you've just made matters much, much, much worse. This solution also doesn't appease the legacy mass media, which themselves used to be the arbiters of truth, and are loath to relinquish that power to some nerds in San Francisco.