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Comment by rdancer | Hacker News Reader

The whole media ecosystem in the USA is out of whack. The lefties crap on Fox, righties crap on MSDNC, but both could better be thought of as news organs of the same establishment, with emphasis on opinion shaping, and de-emphasis on truth. Each target a different population segment. Facebook targets yet another segment, and the question is, will it become annexed to the same establishment?

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> Facebook targets yet another segment

Facebook doesn't target a different population segment or a different political segment of the US, or even the US. It wants everybody to be on Facebook (if they're over the age of 13). That's how it got to $1.65bn users.

As a conduit of political news dissemination, it services a different segment: namely, the segment of people who predominantly get news online.

But that's a self-selecting audience. Facebook users can either look at tending news or ignore it. It's not a political demographic, or if it is, that's incidental.

It's a segment of the populus who have thus far been uniquely positioned to make up their own mind. That has political implications in a democracy that relies on media to shape the electorate's consensus. As Milo Yiannopoulous recently commented on the 2016 primaries: "If the lying mainstream media ever had the power to shape elections, those days are gone." Will that baton be simply picked up by the new media?

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