How Facebook Sees the World - Pacific Standard
▻https://psmag.com/news/how-facebook-sees-the-world
“Fake news” became the media’s favorite electoral boogeyman during the presidential election, and with good reason: Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University found that Facebook and Twitter indeed precipitated an unprecedented level of misinformation, creating what the Columbia Journalism Review called a “media network anchored around Breitbart developed as a distinct and insulated media system, using social media as a backbone to transmit a hyper-partisan perspective to the world.” Research confirms that the wave of anti-establishment fake news that came crashing down on social media users in the months leading up to the election is very real.
Facebook’s old existential crisis appears over: By necessity, it is a publisher rather than simply a technology company—and it needs editors.
But this poses an interesting question: How does Facebook see the world? The company says its mission is to “give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” But it’s far from a neutral platform. In addition to individual products like its much-maligned “Trending News” module, which has vacillated from left-leaning editorial node to hoax whisperer, the platform’s fundamental design subtly shapes our behavior and, in turn, the structure of the digital social relations that reflect and augment our real-life ones, from the media we share to the “filter bubbles” we build for ourselves.
The full corpus of the Guardian’s “Facebook Files” offers a fascinating look at how a technology company long in denial of its editorial responsibilities is suddenly grappling with its new role as the largest de facto censor of information on the planet, one that reportedly deals with more than 6.5 million reports regarding allegedly fake accounts each week. “Facebook cannot keep control of its content,” one company employee told the Guardian. “It has grown too big, too quickly.”
This, in some ways, may mark the beginning of the end of Facebook as a somewhat unfiltered reflection of our “real” social and political worlds—and, in turn, our best and worst impulses. Facebook has become “the most powerful mobilizing force in politics, fast replacing television as the most consequential entertainment medium,” as Farhad Manjoo wrote for the New York Times Magazine in April. “But over the course of 2016, Facebook’s gargantuan influence became its biggest liability.” Now all-powerful, Facebook has adopted the unilateral policing power of a state—a power that may one day control flow of information at the behest of government