Is Facebook really NOT a Media Company?

Facebook is under the microscope as increasingly regulators are seeing Facebook and Google as "publishers", that should be regulated like one. Axios recently interviewed her on the matter.

LinkedIn users have been vocal on the topic as well, most overwhelming believe Facebook isn't doing enough to monitor and police its content.

The prospect of more regulation for Facebook, in the real world where publishers obey stricter rules over what they can and can't publish, seems inevitable. What do you make of it?

Sheryl Sandberg may be a class act, but how do you defend intelligently the position of major media players not being held accountable? Facebook is worth about $500 billion, yet they refuse to take corporate social responsibility for their service.

How do you even calculate the damage to the American psyche and the waning trust of global citizens for the institution of democracy itself given the circumstances of the last year and the fake news scandal? The price has been high, amidst a divisive "new media" where Facebook and Twitter both take an "anything goes" position.

Facebook seems more interested in getting 1 billion people into Virtual Reality than being responsible for the services it provides. Google and Facebook dominate the digital advertising sector, yet refuse to do the hard work of the industry they disrupted, media and journalism, where the truth actually mattered.

Steve Kovach has recently been writing a lot about this, where Sheryl Sandberg's statement are contrasted with the facts of what Facebook does, that makes a case of how Facebook and Google are all essentially media services.

Facebook is a Media Company

1. It distributes news and information to billions of people every month.
2. It is a source of news and the primary source of news for many American citizens and people around the world.
3. It sells ads that run alongside those news articles and videos, generating billions in revenue every quarter.
4. It's funding its own TV shows and creating original content for its audiences.

How is that not the very definition of what a media company is?

Legacy of a Duopoly

Sheryl Sandberg and those Facebook and Google execs better get their stories straight. It's been a tumultuous year for how businesses perceive the ad-giants and regulators abroad are increasingly ready to catagorize them as publishers.

What's true and what isn't on Facebook? (click on this link if the video does not work)

Are Tech Companies exempt from Corporate Social Responsibility?

This would mean they would actually have to have responsibility for the information they boost. What will our children actually remember of these services, long after they have disappeared? That profits are more important than the truth?

That you can use algorithms without any ethical considerations of what the harm might be to the world and to your national security and audience?

We're very different than a media company. - Sheryl Sandberg

It's getting increasingly clear how the very Tech companies that should be our leaders in the world aren't even doing their civic duty and taking corporate responsibility for the legal, social and civic consequences of their services. When we invented the internet, this would have been a worst case scenario of what it would become.

Andrew Bosworth, Facebook's head of consumer hardware, echoed her position on Twitter this week. Twitter invites controversy and lacks proper moderation. Ads on YouTube are paired with the most inappropriate material, where does it end?

SILICON VALLEY'S FAILURE MIGHT COST US OUR FREEDOM

It's one thing to be a society of free-speech, it's quite another to be one of hacked propaganda machines, turned against us. Putting profit over the health of our minds and the accuracy of the information we find on the web isn't freedom, it's a neo-capitalism of big tech.

We are treading down a dangerous path, where Facebook and Google are at the forefront. Just because you don't employ journalists doesn't mean you don't have any civic responsibility to the medium you have created or the integrity of the service you provide.

Google and Facebook aren't blank slate roads, they are engineered a particular way.

If your service doesn't serve the truth, protect citizens from bias and chaos, what good is it?

Facebook's news feed has become what the front page of the newspaper was for older generations of people. Do we want our senior citizens and new global citizens to the old web warped and our mobile life divided?

In December 2016, Zuckerberg said Facebook is "not a traditional media company." Zuckerberg that's true, it's a place where we used to go to chill with friends and family.

According to Business Insider, the outgoing boss of the UK's media regulator, Dame Patricia Hodgson, said both Google and Facebook were publishers in her view.

Now, how do we get a media duopoly to take responsibility for what they have done?

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