Right now, my Facebook news feed is a mess of dog videos, irritating holiday snaps and dubious news articles. But if the social media giant’s current experiment is anything to go by, it could get a whole lot worse.
Facebook is trialling a version of the news feed that only displays posts from friends or from pages that have paid to place that content in your feed. All other content is shifted into a secondary feed called the ‘Explore Feed’. At the moment this version of the Explore Feed is being tested in six countries: Slovakia, Sri Lanka, Serbia, Bolivia, Guatemala and Cambodia.
This is seriously bad news for smaller news organisations that find readers through Facebook, but can’t afford to out-advertise bigger brands. “It’s going to make them virtually invisible,” says Jane Singer, professor of journalism innovation at City University in London.
It’s early days for the trial, but the signs aren’t good. In a Medium post, Slovak journalist Filip Struhárik said that in the days following the change, media pages in his country received just a quarter of the likes and share they usually get. As of yesterday, he said that the average number of interactions for the 60 biggest media sites had stabilised at around half of their usual numbers.
Facebook’s choice of test countries for this experiment is particularly disturbing. Cambodia ranks close to the bottom of the World Press Freedom Index with the government keeping very close links with leading media organisation. In July 2016, Kem Ley, a political commentator and vocal critic of the government, was shot dead in broad daylight in a coffee shop in the capital, Phnom Penh. Sri Lanka, Bolivia and Guatemala also all rank in the bottom half of the press freedom rankings.
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“A lot of really good journalism is being done by smaller hungry organisations,” Singer says. By shifting their policy so only sites that can afford to pay get in front of readers, Facebook would undermine smaller, more independent-minded organisations. In the UK, Singer says that a similar move would play into the hands of our biggest media brands. “It seems it would help organisations like the Daily Mail that have a big following.”
In a blog post defending the experiment, Adam Mosseri, Facebook’s head of news feed, explained the experiment was designed to work out what people wanted to see in their feeds. “The goal of this test is to understand if people prefer to have separate places for personal and public content. We will hear what people say about the experience to understand if it’s an idea worth pursuing any further,” he wrote.
But Facebook is much more than just a place where people go to check out jealousy-inducing engagement photos from their friends. It’s a place where loads of us – 45 per cent of Americans to be precise get at least some of our news from. So when Facebook tweaks its news algorithms, it has a big impact on the kinds of ideas that people are exposed to.
And in the past, Facebook has been quite happy to promote the ideas of whoever paid – no questions asked. Earlier this year it admitted that Russian-backed agencies had likely spent $100,000 on Facebook ads promoted through dodgy pages promoting polarising views on immigration, race and gay rights. In September, a ProPublica investigation found Facebook enabled advertisers to target users through anti-Semitic ad categories such as ‘Jew Haters’.
In short, Facebook has been quick to take advertiser money and slow to really put any limits on how those advertisers use the platform. Applying the same attitude to news could be disastrous, Singer says. “It would be an appalling thing for democracy if the only people that could get their message out were the ones that won a bidding war.”
“We’ve seen what happens to our political system when the people who could give the most had the most say,” she says. “That same kind of driving force behind our information environment would be a terrible thing.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
