Facebook was perhaps the pioneer social networking site, surpassing early failures and moderate successes like Myspace. Today, though, it’s often seen as a congested social hellscape, overrun with posts from your pregnant high school classmates, vaguely racist rants and OMG this adorable little girl asked her brother where babies come from and YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENED NEXT.
It looks like Facebook’s status may be changing, though, as the company looks for ways to propel itself further and further into the future. Tuesday, The New York Times reported that Facebook has been meeting with a few major media outlets. Why? Well, the company is discussing plans to publish articles and content from these sources directly onto Facebook’s site, rather than on the websites for individual publications.
This development has the potential to cause enormous upheaval — we wonder if any of it will be good.
Right now, social media sites are pretty much life-support systems for media outlets. As you know, newspapers, magazines and the like depend on advertising dollars to stay afloat. With print in decline, news organizations depend on social media sites to distribute links to their stories and content far beyond their normal reach. Facebook is the most prominent broker of this type of deal — high shares on Facebook bring in views and advertising dollars, helping news organizations keep the lights on. For that reason, Facebook’s proposal would change this way of running things. Media outlets would publish directly to Facebook, eliminating the need for readers to go to the outlets’ individual sites to look at stories or videos. Just as well, ads would appear on Facebook instead of on their individual pages, too — Facebook would share ad revenue, obviously.
This could be great. It would streamline the content-sharing process, raking in that sweet, sweet ad money faster than ever. And, it would serve to make Facebook more palatable. In 2014, Facebook was the only major social network to see a decline in active usage per month.
But there’s something a bit ominous about the idea.
Should they go through with it, media companies would be placing their lives in Facebook’s hands, and what fickle hands those are. That’s because Facebook, at the end of the day, cares only about Facebook. If this doesn’t work out for it, the media companies’ boom could quickly become a bust. Things like this have happened before: On April 10, 2012, 4 million people were using The Washington Post’s social reader on Facebook. But Facebook changed the way its content algorithm works, causing readership to evaporate to zero by April 14. The same thing happened to Upworthy, whose readership declined 25 percent in a single month following an algorithm change.
Buying into Facebook’s plan may be beneficial in the short-term, but placing so much trust in this giant company could be extremely dangerous, not to mention the ethical quandary of allowing the massive company to control media content. Let’s not forget: Companies like Facebook and Google are the Standard Oil and Carnegie Steel of our time. We should be careful about how much influence we freely give them.
[A version of this story ran on page 6 on 3/26/2015]
