On Fri, Sep 9, 2016 at 12:13 PM, Adam Bowie <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > Just because a website doesn't consider itself part of the news-media, for > better or for worse, it *is* a dissipater of news. They've actively done > deals with news providers to get outlets to use Facebook, most recently > encouraging the uptake of Facebook Instant Articles (those little lightning > logos which mean that FB serves the story rather than, say, the NYT). > > 62% of Americans say they get news from social media with 66% of FB users > saying they do (http://www.journalism.org/2016/05/26/news-use-across- > social-media-platforms-2016/). > That's a bit like saying Jon Stewart had an obligation to report the news on The Daily Show because studies showed a large percentage of people were getting their news from the comedy series. Stewart was the first to suggest people who went to him for news were misguided. I'd contend the same for those who think of Facebook as a news service or any sort of journalistic entity. > > And they're disrupting even the digital advertising plans of other news > outlets, that had already been disrupted by the internet in first place. A > number of news providers that had been seeing increase digital advertising > revenues have now seen them flatten out, while that revenue has gone to FB, > built upon those shared links that FB uses to keep you on its platform. > It's hoovering up digital cash. > I freely agree Facebook has disrupted other digital media outlets, and they have manipulated the system to, as you put it, hoover up the cash. That's the free market at work. Ain't it grand? > > Look, I'm not here to defend commercial news organisations that are seeing > their business models obliterated by digital newcomers. They exist in a > capitalist system. But those digital newcomers can't just ignore all > responsibility. FB was completely wrong to just get rid of its editorial > team, and as PGage said, should have either trained them or hired new > independent editors. It's not like there's a shortage of journalists > looking for jobs! And it's not as though FB can't afford that kind of > thing. > > FB also needs to take its editorial responsibilities more seriously. > Facebook has no editorial responsibility. But even if they did, many (I'd venture to say most) digital newsgathering organizations have either scaled back or entirely eliminated editors. I'd hold real journalistic enterprises accountable for that before asking it of Facebook. > > > Perhaps FB does it differently in the UK and Europe, but perhaps not. > Either way, such action would be illegal over here, and anything that's > advertising, including on FB, Twitter or wherever, should be labelled as > such. Plenty of celebrities posting paid Tweets fall foul of this > incidentally. > > Facebook notoriously does not disclose data, metrics, analytics, or any information about the data it access or distributes. Zuckerberg has said he's not even inclined to release the exact amount of active users the site has. Absent a court order, nobody at Facebook is likely to talk about money taken in for something trending, and the word trending is ubiquitous enough that one could easily argue that there's nothing to the word to imply those posts are or are not ads to begin with. As for celebs on Twitter whoring themselves out for a buck... yeah, that annoys me, but I think they are worse on (the Facebook owned) Instagram. The number of people (OK, attractive women) I follow on Instagram who post that they achieved an amazing figure because of a certain brand of tea... I say this as an occasional tea drinker, it isn't that easy. -- Kevin M. (RPCV) -- -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
