What about Facebook?

"It isn't a media company internally," [says ex- FB ad manager Antonio García Martínez]. "It's a hacker company internally."

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[B]y the beginning of 2018, Facebook began a sharp – and subtly frightening – turnaround. No longer denying its outsize media role, the company announced one initiative designed to create a trustworthiness measurement for news, and another to increase the content you get from close friends and family, presumably as opposed to evil (and possibly foreign) strangers.

The goal, said Facebook News Feed chief Adam Mosseri, was to "make sure the news people see, while less overall, is high-quality."

  Matt Taibbi

How on earth would increasing what you get from friends and family make sure the news you're getting is high quality? If you're a family of Trumpettes or Fox & Friends watchers, the possibility of you getting high quality news is now even less.

Now, he claims, Facebook is just trying to do the right thing. "We take our responsibilities seriously," he says, explaining the thinking behind the new initiatives. "In a world where the Internet exists, how can we make the world better?"

Not by narrowing down what people see to mostly what their family and friends share.

For Facebook to be both the cause of and the solution to so many informational ills, the design mechanism built into our democracy to prevent such problems – a free press – had to have been severely disabled well before we got here.

And it was. Long before 2016 had a chance to happen, the news media in the United States was effectively destroyed. For those of us in the business, the manner of conquest has been the most galling part. The CliffsNotes version? Facebook ate us [...] first by gutting our distribution networks, and then by using advanced data-mining techniques to create hypertargeted advertising with which no honest media outlet could compete. This wipeout of the press left Facebook in possession of power it neither wanted nor understood.

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Facebook never wanted to be editor-in-chief of the universe, and the relatively vibrant free press that toppled the likes of McCarthy and Nixon never imagined it could be swallowed by a pet-meme distributor.

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Facebook, which to this day seems at best to dimly understand how the news business works, [has maintained a] longstanding insistence that it's not a media company. Wired was even inspired to publish a sarcastic self-help quiz for Facebook execs on "How to tell if you're a media company." It included such questions as "Are you the country's largest source of news?"

The answer is a resounding yes. An astonishing 45 percent of Americans get their news from this single source.

Indeed, that is astonishing. How lazy are we? Memes and passed-around headlines are now news for 45% of us? Not just astonishing, but appalling and alarming.

And, speaking of alarming:

Facebook didn't just use its data to help advertisers place targeted ads. It also used AI-enhanced technology and tools like GPS to track users' information in order to learn more and more about them, all while constantly improving the reach and power of the company's advertising capabilities. In perhaps the creepiest example, Facebook applied for (and received, last year) a patent for a tool called Techniques, for emotion detection and content delivery. It would use the camera in your phone to take pictures of you as you scroll through content. Facebook would then use facial analysis to measure how much you did or did not like the content in question, so as to determine what kind of stuff to send your way. Ideas like this are what make Facebook, at times, feel like a giant blood-engorged tick hanging off your frontal lobe.

Continue reading.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.