Facebook: Be Bold and Reimagine the News
The industrial revolution saw unprecedented rises in the productivity and quality of life for entire nations. Workers migrated away from farms into increasingly dense cities to work in factories. And yet, as the productivity and wealth of nations soared conditions in the new cities rapidly deteriorated. Homes were packed together without ventilation or toilets and raw sewage was dumped into drinking water. As a result of so many people crammed together in squalor and filth, newly industrialized towns were ravaged by cholera, tuberculosis, typhus, typhoid, and influenza. In 1841 the average life expectancy in rural areas of England was 45 years of age but only 37 in London and a shocking 26 in Liverpool. Rapid urbanization was literally killing people.
Before humanity could truly reap the benefits of industrialization these devastating sanitation problems needed to be dealt with. Combatting the filth and pollution plaguing industrialized towns required massive civic undertakings. City-wide sewer systems needed to be installed so that human waste was kept separate from the drinking water supply, new city regulations needed to be enforced to ensure homes were ventilated and streets were kept clean, and medical knowledge needed to progress to understand how diseases spread.
The digital revolution we’re now living through has a similar promise to improve our lives and bring untold prosperity, but we need to solve the digital equivalent of the raw sewage and disease infecting our online society. The internet has made publishing and sharing ideas cheap and easy, but it has destroyed the traditional news media. In the past, a small number of media outlets and their journalists and editorial teams painstakingly reported and edited stories and ensured a stream of high-quality, well-researched factual news which supported an informed population. Now, traditional news media revenues are collapsing as more and more people get their news from social media where the only metric that counts for a news story is if it’s provocative enough to generate clicks. The result is a massive spread of conspiracy theories and misinformation tailored to confirm each person’s existing worldview. In this new world there is nothing forcing news stories to adhere to reality — in fact in the past US election fantasy news was even more popular than the real stuff. In the past if the newspaper that showed up on everyone’s doorstep each morning was full of misinformation, sensationalism, and outright fiction parading as journalism we would be rightly outraged and demand change, and yet that is exactly the world we find ourselves in now. This pollution in our informational drinking water is threatening to divide our society and rip it apart if it is not addressed.
While it’s tempting to see this shift as a sign that we are no longer getting our news from centralized media sources, the opposite is actually happening. Instead of a small number of news media companies being the bearers of information to the masses, now it is an even smaller number of Silicon Valley tech companies. According to a 2016 study 67% of adult Americans get their news from social media with 44% getting their news from Facebook specifically, and this trend is only likely to continue. If anything, media has become more centralized in the digital age rather than less.
The significance of this is monumental. Facebook has quietly gone from being a novel sideshow for sharing cat pictures to being the digital version of the newspaper that shows up on everyone’s doorstep each morning. It is quite likely the single most powerful media empire ever created. By controlling which information is spread and which is suppressed, Facebook has incredible influence over public discussion and public opinion. Despite this amazing power, Facebook insists it is not a media company. It’s not hard to understand why — if Facebook is a media company then it must take moral and legal responsibility for the media being posted. Being the worldwide arbiter of public opinion and public discussion is an awesome responsibility, and Facebook will rightly face intense public scrutiny and likely regulation by world governments.
Facebook only has 2 realistic options moving forward: either ban all news sharing from the site, or embrace their role as the world’s most powerful media company. It will be tempting to take the former approach as governments wise-up to the power Facebook now wields and begin imposing regulations. This, however, would be a shame because it would be passing up an opportunity to reimagine what news distribution can be in the digital age. Just as in the industrial revolution the solution to urban disease was to build sewers rather than abolish cities, the answer to improving news media now is to improve social media’s handling of news rather than stripping it from the platform. What if Facebook optimized its algorithm to produce informed citizens grounded in reality instead of optimizing for maximum clicks? What if Facebook tailored their news for each user to broaden their views rather than reinforcing them? Facebook employs some of the greatest AI researchers in the world — what if Facebook used their skills to make their platform truly beneficial to society rather than simply maximizing their short-term profit? Mark Zuckerberg is no stranger to grand promises to make the world a better place. He should start with Facebook itself.