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A Small Group of Journalists Control and Decide What Should Trend On Facebook (gizmodo.com)
An anonymous reader writes: According to five former members of Facebook's trending news team, "news curators" as they're known internally, Zuckerberg and company take a downright dim view of the media industry and its talent. In interviews with Gizmodo, these former curators described grueling work conditions, humiliating treatment, and a secretive, imperious culture in which they were treated as disposable outsiders. After doing a tour in Facebook's news trenches, almost all of them came to believe that they were there not to work, but to serve as training modules for Facebook's algorithm." "We choose what's trending," said one former news curator. From personal experience I can share a similar incident. An Indian outlet extensively wrote about flaws in Facebook's Free Basics. Few days later, "Ban [that outlet's name]" was trending on Facebook. Clicking on it, for the first few hours, literally didn't return any relevant result, as nobody was talking about it, and no media outlet had written about it. It was after more than a day or so after this fabricated item kept trending that some other outlets started to write about it. (That's common in the media industry: writing about trending topics.) In the past, we've also seen Facebook employees ask whether the company should do anything to stop Donald Trump from becoming the president.
We'd better be careful as a society about slowly eroding the value of in-depth, not-yet-trending or popular journalism that creates significant public value, but is hard to recognize while it's being done.
The kind of respected journalism that takes time and effort to research and write, where the journalist/researcher/writer don't have the promise of instant reward, and maybe are facing significant personal risk to find the story that takes down an injustice, powerful person, or entrenched interest.
If you don't watch out diligently, the funneling of our popular consciousness through these most-votes-win, popular-for-today, let's-not-offend-anyone, feel-good-only channels will result in us becoming more and more of a stupidity contest where the fastest, easiest, cheap thrills and sugary taste wins and we have no cultural backbone worth respecting at all.