[kictanet] Facebook Versus the Media [feedly]

[Sidney Ochieng]

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Facebook Versus the Media
// Feed: » stratechery by Ben Thompson

Facebook found itself in the middle of another media controversy last week.
Here’s the New York Times:

The image is iconic: A naked, 9-year-old girl fleeing napalm bombs during
the Vietnam War, tears streaming down her face. The picture from 1972,
which went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for spot news photography, has
since been used countless times to illustrate the horrors of modern warfare.

But for Facebook, the image of the girl, Phan Thi Kim Phuc, was one that
violated its standards about nudity on the social network. So after a
Norwegian author posted images about the terror of war with the photo to
Facebook, the company removed it.

The move triggered a backlash over how Facebook was censoring images. When
a Norwegian newspaper, Aftenposten, cried foul over the takedown of the
picture, thousands of people globally responded on Friday with an act of
virtual civil disobedience by posting the image of Ms. Phuc on their
Facebook pages and, in some cases, daring the company to act. Hours after
the pushback, Facebook reinstated the photo across its site.

This, like many of Facebook’s recent run-ins with the media, has been like
watching an old couple fight: they are nominally talking about the same
episode, but in reality both are so wrapped up in their own issues and
grievances that they are talking past each other.

Facebook Owns Facebook.com

Start with the media. Aftenposten Editor-in-chief Espen Egil Hansen wrote
an open-letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg that was, well, pretty
amazing, and I’m not sure that’s a compliment:

Facebook has become a world-leading platform for spreading information, for
debate and for social contact between persons. You have gained this
position because you deserve it. But, dear Mark, you are the world’s most
powerful editor. Even for a major player like Aftenposten, Facebook is hard
to avoid. In fact we don’t really wish to avoid you, because you are
offering us a great channel for distributing our content. We want to reach
out with our journalism.

However, even though I am editor-in-chief of Norway’s largest newspaper, I
have to realize that you are restricting my room for exercising my
editorial responsibility. This is what you and your subordinates are doing
in this case.

Actually, no, that is not what is happening at all. Aftenposten is not
Facebook, and Facebook is not “Norway’s largest newspaper”. Accordingly,
Facebook — and certainly not Mark Zuckerberg — did not take the photo down
from Aftenposten.no. They did not block the print edition. They did not
edit dear Espen. Rather, Facebook removed a post on Facebook.com, which
Aftenposten does not own, and which Hansen admits in his own open letter is
something freely offered to the newspaper, one that they take because it is
“a great channel for distributing our content.”

Let me foreshadow what I will say later: Facebook screwed this up. But that
doesn’t change the fact that Facebook.com is a private site, and while
Aftenposten is more than happy to leverage Facebook for its own benefit
that by no means suggests Aftenposten has a single iota of ownership over
its page or anyone else’s.

The Freedom of the Internet

Unfortunately, Hansen’s letter gets worse:

The media have a responsibility to consider publication in every single
case. This may be a heavy responsibility. Each editor must weigh the pros
and cons. This right and duty, which all editors in the world have, should
not be undermined by algorithms encoded in your office in California…

The least Facebook should do in order to be in harmony with its time is
introduce geographically differentiated guidelines and rules for
publication. Furthermore, Facebook should distinguish between editors and
other Facebook-users. Editors cannot live with you, Mark, as a master
editor.

I’ll be honest, this made me mad. Hansen oh-so-blithely presumes that he,
simply by virtue of his job title, is entitled to special privileges on
Facebook. But why, precisely, should that be the case? The entire premise
of Facebook, indeed, the underpinning of the company’s success, is that it
is a platform that can be used by every single person on earth. There are
no gatekeepers, and certainly no outside editors. Demanding special
treatment from Facebook because one controls a printing press is not only
nonsensical it is downright antithetical to not just the premise of
Facebook but the radical liberty afforded by the Internet. Hansen can write
his open letter on aftenposten.no and I can say he’s being ridiculous on
stratechery.com and there is not a damn thing anyone, including Mark
Zuckerberg, can do about it.1

Make no mistake, I recognize the threats Facebook poses to discourse and
politics; I’ve written about it explicitly. There are very real concerns
that people are not being exposed to news that makes them uncomfortable,
and Hansen is right that the photo in question is an example of exactly why
making people feel uncomfortable is so important.

But it should also not be forgotten that the prison of engagement-driving
news that people are locking themselves in is one of their own making: no
one is forced to rely on Facebook for news, just as Aftenposten isn’t
required to post its news on Facebook. And on the flipside, the freedom and
reach afforded by the Internet remain so significant that the
editor-in-chief of a newspaper I had never previously read can force the
CEO of one of the most valuable companies in the world accede to his
demands by rousing worldwide outrage.

These two realities are inescapably intertwined, and as a writer who almost
certainly would have never been given an inch of space in Aftenposten, I’ll
stick with the Internet.

Facebook is Not a Media Company

One more rant, while I’m on a roll: journalists everywhere are using this
episode to again make the case that Facebook is a media company. This piece
by Peter Kafka was written before this photo controversy but is an
excellent case-in-point (and, sigh, it is another open letter):

Dear Mark, We get it. We understand why you don’t want to call Facebook a
media company. Your investors don’t want to invest in a media company, they
want to invest in a technology company. Your best-and-brightest engineers?
They don’t want to work at a media company. And we’re not even going to
mention Trending Topicgate here, because that would be rude.

But here’s the deal. When you gather people’s attention, and sell that
attention to advertisers, guess what? You’re a media company. And you’re
really good at it. Really, really good. Billions of dollars a quarter good.

Let’s be clear: Facebook could call themselves a selfie-stick company and
their valuation wouldn’t change an iota. As Kafka notes later in the
article Facebook gets all their content for free, which is a pretty big
deal.

Indeed, I think one of the (many) reasons the media is so flummoxed with
Facebook is that the company has stolen their business model and hugely
improved on it. Remember, the entire reason why the media was so successful
was because they made massive fixed cost investments in things like
printing presses, delivery trucks, wireless spectrum, etc. that gave them
monopolies or at worst oligopolies on local attention and thus advertising.
The only flaw in the ointment was that actual content had to be created
continuously, and that’s expensive.

Facebook, like all Internet companies, takes the leverage of fixed costs to
an exponentially greater level and marries that with free content creation
that is far more interesting to far more people than old media ever was,
which naturally attracts advertisers. To put it in academic terms, the
Internet has allowed Facebook to expand the efficient frontier of attention
gathering and monetization, ruining most media companies’ business model.

In other words, had Kafka insisted that Facebook is an advertising company,
just like media companies, I would nod in agreement. That advertising,
though, doesn’t just run against journalism: it runs against baby pictures,
small businesses, cooking videos and everything in between. Facebook may be
everything to the media, but the media is one of many types of content on
Facebook.

In short, as long as Facebook doesn’t create content I think it’s a pretty
big stretch to say they are a media company; it simply muddies the debate
unnecessarily, and this dispute with Aftenposten is a perfect example of
why being clear about the differences between a platform and a media
company is important.

The Facebook-Media Disconnect

The disconnect in this debate reminds me of this picture:



Ignore the fact that Facebook owns a VR company; the point is this:
Facebook is, for better or worse, running a product that is predicated on
showing people exactly what they want to see, all the way down to the
individual. And while there is absolutely editorial bias in any algorithm,
the challenge is indeed a technical one being worked out at a scale few can
fully comprehend.

That Norwegian editor-in-chief, meanwhile, is still living in a world in
which he and other self-appointed gatekeepers controlled the projector for
the front of the room, and the facts of this particular case aside, it is
awfully hard to avoid the conclusion that he and the rest of the media feel
entitled to individuals’ headsets.

Facebook’s Mistake

Still, the facts of this case do matter: first off, quite obviously this
photo should have never been censored, even if the initial flagging was
understandable. What is really concerning, though, was the way Facebook
refused to back down, not only continuing to censor the photo but actually
barring the journalist who originally posted it from the platform for three
days. Yes, this was some random Facebook staffer in Hamburg, but that’s the
exact problem! No one at Facebook’s headquarters seems to care about this
stuff unless it turns into a crisis, which means said crisis are only going
to continue with potentially unwanted effects.

The truth is that Facebook may not be a media company, but users do read a
lot of news there; by extension, the company may not have a monopoly in
news distribution, but the impact of so many self-selecting Facebook as
their primary news source has significant effects on society. And, as I’ve
noted repeatedly, society and its representatives may very well strike
back; this sort of stupidity via apathy will only hasten the reckoning.2

It should be noted that this is exactly why the Peter Thiel-Gawker episode
was so concerning.And, I’d add, this is exactly why I think Facebook should
have distanced themselves from Thiel
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Touched not typed,

Sidney
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