Facebook Means News. But Not for Good.

Today is an important day for all media professionals. "Wired" published its article titled "Inside Facebook Two Years of Hell", which gives some clear understanding of inside processes in the company, regarding the problems the team has with the mess of reshaping the whole industry.

The 11K words text of Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogestein is crucial for the important discussion about the future of journalism in the times of alternative facts.

The first surprising moment in their in-depth piece, is how small the "Trending Topics" team of Facebook was in the Eve of fake news rise. Just a very little amount of people, mainly young graduates, were responsible for the feed of popular news subjects that popped up when people opened Facebook. The feed was generated by an algorithm but moderated by a team of about 25 people with backgrounds in journalism. 

If something like a mass shooting happened, and Facebook’s algorithm was slow to pick up on it, they would inject a story about it into the feed. But just to the level when algorithm itself get to the point of doing that independently, without need of a human factor. One of the guys in the team, was the leak to Gizmodo in 2016 suggesting that "Facebook’s Trending team worked with a bunch of biased curators “injecting” liberal stories and “blacklisting” conservative ones". 

But this is not a story of the trending topics team. It is more general and complicated. "Wired" spoke to 51 former and present employees who told the same basic tale: "of a company, and a CEO, whose techno-optimism has been crushed as they’ve learned the myriad ways their platform can be used for ill". 

It is obvious today that Facebook hasn't been ready to be a dominant force in the news industry. All the insiders whom "Wired" spoke to, agree with that. The saddest thing is their look-alike strategy to give absolutely the same presentation of every news package appeared on the feed. This meant that all news stories looked roughly the same as each other, too, whether they were investigations, a gossip, or flat-out lies from somebody writing blah-blah in a basement.

Facebook argued that this democratized information. But it has opened the door for everybody to reach people's minds equipped with the same publishing instrument.. It is the main problem and main trouble for all of us to distinguish the source or the media behind the info. That is how the fake news came into being.

You don't need even the entire story. You need just a headline which could be distributed on the public feeds, massively. You could do what you want and to do it simple. You can make people feel angry, or feel sad, or feel sympathetic. Touching their feelings, you have remote access to their decisions. Even political ones.

As a TV journalist, I was witnessing the rise of trolls in the industry. As many colleagues, I used to like using questions from Facebook followers of our current affairs show, but 3 years ago, I noticed the alarming-signals behind them.

Imagine, a political figure sitting in front of me in the studio and the feed bombarded by hundreds of fake comments generated by his or her mates or political rivals. The aim is simple - to avoid or force the interview in different direction or to create alternative "reality" very different of what was happened in the studio. The purpose is to spin the impression, mainly for those who are not watching the event live, but reading the comments afterwards.

It's a social schizophrenia. And truly, I decided that is useless for me and the audience.

Think about your daily FB expirience - its look like a parallel world, with trending stuff which sometimes seems really remote to your personality. Like you fall off into ocean without a life-vest. In this case, you are trying to swim chaotically, without aim, surrounded only by water, knowing that there is no bottom. The public and media environment is the ocean.

We are the swimmers.

Reading "Wired" article, I am truly asking myself: If Facebook really deserve its protection as a neutral platform? Will Facebook continue to claim it isn't in the news business? How News Feed Integrity Task Force will change the game?

Read the piece. It is really unique and rare behind the scenes picture of Facebook and the way the company has affected the media industry. And all of us. And itself.