Facebook cares only about Facebook

Facebook's strong crackdown on independent media came last autumn in Slovakia, Cambodia, Guatemala and three other countries.

The social giant removed news from the user's News Feed news, hiding them in a new, difficult source to find. Independent publishers reported losing up to 80 per cent of the audience during this experiment.

Facebook doesn't care. At least it usually does.

Despite the angry response in the six countries affected by Facebook's game with the algorithm, the company is now continuing with similar changes to its News Feed, globally. These changes will likely lower news priorities from professional publishers, and would instead favour posts by friends and family of a user. Many of the media organisations will see a severe drop in traffic unless they pay Facebook to include their news on the user's News Feds.

At the heart of this change is Facebook's attempt not to be seen as a news editor, but as a neutral platform for the interactions between friends. Faced with strong criticism of his role in spreading dezinformation, and perhaps in the influence of the US and United Kingdom elections, Facebook is trying to limit exposure by limiting its role. This has been the case for a long time.

This rebalancing implies various things for various actors ʹ for publishers, meaning that they will almost certainly be punished for relying on a platform that has never been a completely reliable partner. Facebook never spoke to publishers in Slovakia, because publishers are less important than other parties on this new Facebook reincarnation. But more generally, Facebook doesn't talk to you, because Facebook knows what you want.

Facebook collects information on every person's interactions with the website and many other online actions so Facebook knows a lot about where our attention is focused. People say they're interested in a wide range of news from different political preferences, but Facebook knows they really want angry articles confirming political partiality.

The publishers in Slovakia and the United States may warn of harm to democracy if Facebook readers get less news, but Facebook knows people will be very happy with more posts from friends and family.

For Facebook, our preferences revealed by analyzing our behavior speak a lot. Our words, on the other hand, are often simply ignored. (Keep in mind when answering the Facebook question of which media you trust).

Tristan Harris, a strong critic of the advertising-based internet, recently offered me an analogy to explain a problem with revealed preferences. I promise to go to the gym more often in 2018, but every morning when I wake up, my partner gives me a plate of doughnuts and asks me to lie down and eat. My discovered preferences show that I am more interested in eating pancakes than in practicing. But it's very perverted that my partner gives me what I want so much to eat, ignoring what I said I aspire.

Feed News's future change of Facebook won't eliminate false news... at least that didn't happen in Slovakia. People share sensational or shocking news, while more reliable news tends not to become viral. When people choose to subscribe to reliable sources of information, they are seeking to go to the gym. With these changes on News Feed, Facebook was thrown out of the window by trained athletes and enrolled in a service that brings their doughnuts home. Why do 2 billion people accept a service that reminds them that it is designed for their well - being while constantly ignoring their declared preferences? Many people feel that they have no choice. Facebook is the only social network, for example, where I meet temporarily with some of my friends, especially those in my childhood and high school.

I don't want Facebook to go away. But more and more, I think the only way that Facebook can hear people's expressed preferences is if people start building their options. At this moment, Facebook selects which news will appear at the top of your News Feed, optimizing <x0 <x0” and “quality time”. You don't like Facebook elections? Too bad. You can make Feysbuk temporarily feed them with chronological news, but when you close the window, you will return to the pathetic Facebook algorithm.

This fall, my colleagues and I released social gobo, a news collector who could fit. Gobo presents posts from friends, but he also offers you some “sliders” that manage what news you see and what you're missing. You want more serious news, less humor? Move one of them. Would you like to hear more feminine voices? Except gender slider, or click on <x2 all men”. Currently, Gobo has a dozen ways of adjusting newscasts, and more will come. Gobo is a provocation, not a product. While it's a good tool to read Twitter, Facebook Pages allows us only to show them (pages that are losing priority on News Fed) and not posts by friends, thus undermining his function as a social network collector. Our goal is not to convince you to read your social media through Gobos, but to encourage platforms like Facebook to give readers more control over what they see.

If you want to use Facebook to follow the news, you should be able to do it, even if the Facebook algorithm knows what gets your attention. There's a strong debate on how Facebook should present the news to readers. Should he filter out false news? Prioritize high-quality news? Focus on friends and family instead of politics? Facebook's decision to run news is an attempt to avoid this challenging debate. And maybe we were wrong to invite Facebook to this debate, at the very beginning.

She's from The Atlantic, the World.