Facebook wants to delete this post
There is an old saying in news: “When a dog bites a man, that’s not news. When a man bites a dog, that’s news.”
Mark Zuckerberg and his Facebook algorithm minions are re-defining news in what could be described as “dogma bites man.”
Facebook recently changed the rules that govern what you see in your “news feed.” They now push down “news” posted by media outlets and push up posts by friends with their vacation photos, antics of pets and achievements of offspring.
The problem is that unless you go in and tweak your feed, you will just see the content in which Facebook decides you are most interested and only if you scroll far enough down to find it. Once you show interest in a topic, Facebook decides you need more of the same.
Just getting one view of the news or one slant on events becomes dogma, and that will bite you. Bias and subjectivity do not render well-informed individuals ready to participate in democracy. Dogma renders minions.
Even if you only want to see your current values reflected in your news, do you trust Zuckerberg to deliver it? Remember the scandal a few weeks back in which Facebook was called on the carpet for routinely suppressing conservative content?
Our suspicion is that despite Zuckerberg’s claims that the move is about giving users what they want, it is really about keeping you within the confines of Facebook where his ads can target you and he doesn’t spend money to produce content because it comes free from your friends and family. When you wander away to explore a news topic, that’s less money for Mark.
In a world in which Facebook is the defacto government and political news source for most people in their 20s and 30s, in which 44 percent of us regularly read news content on Facebook, and in which 1.65 billion users a month access the Facebook news feed, the decisions by Facebook matter and impact an informed electorate.
Facebook would best serve us all by getting out of the way and allowing the “news feed” to be what most people assume it to be: a rolling, chronological list of recent events. Zuckerberg should limit his biases to his personal news feed, where everyone can be annoyed until the point that they hit “unfriend.”
This story was originally published July 7, 2016 at 7:00 PM with the headline "Facebook wants to delete this post."