The Facebook bias-bubble just got worse. A new report from the Wall Street Journal says Facebook has been putting its finger on the scale with Facebook Live videos, paying off a chosen few media organizations to put content on their site.
According to the Journal's list, Facebook pays Vox, not Ziff Davis; Al Jazeera, not Newsmax; and the New York Times, not the Washington Post.
Yes, there are some sour grapes here. I freely admit it: I'd love Facebook money to be flowing into our daily Facebook Live shows, which we produce on a shoestring. But stepping back, this is another major warning against Facebook eating the Web, Because if Facebook becomes your front page to the Internet, you are swallowing Facebook's bias and Facebook's choices.
The company's supposedly neutral algorithm has always been a lie, anyway. Facebook's algorithm is perpetually tipped by ad money that's paid to "boost" posts, which means that subsidized posts surface more frequently in your feed than unsubsidized ones.
So even beyond this live video controversy, the next Matt Drudge, a strong individual voice with a dream, would be unlikely to actually surface in your Facebook feed unless he's set aside more ad money than his competitors to tip the scale.
All of this gets stuffed into the algorithmic filter bubble, where we're generally only shown opinions with which we already agree. Although Facebook's filter bubble has no political agenda, it serves to draw the nation into opposing camps rather than encouraging commonality and compromise.
This is all hugely important because, if you listen to our possible future partner Nick Denton, Facebook is where we will get news on the Web. In an interview with Time today, he says that in five years, "Facebook will be the only general news brand."
As long as Facebook is just one outlet in a healthy Web news diet, this isn't too much of a concern. It's free to push the news sources it prefers. But its audience is so huge that many organizations, including ourselves, find we have no choice but to play the Facebook game, even though we're at a disadvantage. And if that audience only grows, Facebook will control America's news diet.
Plenty for Right Wingers to Get Angry About
If you look at the list of Facebook's highest-paid outlets, they definitely seem to skew one way politically. Facebook is just now getting out of a controversy over its "Trending Topics" field, where former staffers said right-wing perspectives weren't getting equal time. Facebook denied that.
The Wall Street Journal didn't publish a complete list of outlets Facebook is paying, and it's possible the Journal may be putting its own spin on the news by excluding right-wing news sources. Facebook's money seems to skew center-left. The story says Facebook is paying BuzzFeed, the New York Times, CNN, the Huffington Post, Vox, NPR, Vice, and Al Jazeera. No right-wing publications (such as Fox or Breitbart) or far left-wing publications (such as US Uncut or The Nation) are included.
We're in a crisis moment in American politics, where the "paranoid style" reigns. My Facebook feed is full of overheated conspiracy theories, battles over who's the worst victim of the faceless overlords who seem to rule our world. With its payola scheme, Facebook is only making things worse. It's making it clear that it is the unseen overlord, and it has an agenda—maybe not a purely political one, but an agenda nonetheless.
There seems to be a real disconnect between what Facebook actually is and what it purports to be. Mark Zuckerberg has said publicly that Facebook is a neutral platform which "stands for giving everyone a voice." But it's clear that Facebook is willing to vote with its wallet to make some of those voices louder than others.
The open Web is the only answer. But in an era of easy-to-use apps and algorithmic story discovery, it's an answer fewer people seem to be choosing.