Unless Facebook has suddenly grown a backbone, its rebooted News initiative will be another way for conservatives to badger the company into appeasement. bafeldman writes
A Facebook worker scans data, trying to root out bad actors. Photo: Noah Berger/AFP/Getty Images Facebook is calling a do-over. The social network is apparently hiring editors who will curate a new section of the app, a News tab that keeps users up-to-date and that is separate from the News Feed. Campbell Brown, Facebook’s head of news partnerships, told the Times that the goal “is to provide a personalized, highly relevant experience for people.” Personalized and highly relevant? Tell me more.
The revived effort is similar but not identical. It’s specifically focused on news, rather than just whether a story is trending, which is a useless metric for worthiness. The new News tab, as far as I can tell, is not yet another attempt to get digital publishers to hitch themselves to Facebook and create content specifically for the platform — an arrangement that has never worked out well in the long term for publishers.
Overlapping with Facebook’s complete upheaval of the news industry and rampant misinformation on its platform is the company’s inability to ignore bad-faith criticism from conservatives. Right-wing politicians repeatedly use the specter of “anti-conservative bias” to bludgeon Facebook and keep it from being more aggressive in other areas, like content moderation.
“Several interviewees believed that this change disproportionately decreased the reach of conservative news content ,” the report states, referencing a much-publicized News Feed ranking change in 2018 that prioritized posts from personal contacts over brand pages. Despite this, sites like Fox News, Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire, and Breitbart still get healthy distribution on Facebook; in some cases, they perform better than other mainstream outlets that aim down the center.
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