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Comment by grenoire | Hacker News Reader

Facebook creates no content whatsoever on its own. Its a crowd-funded link aggregator that earns revenue by ads.

Although you are correct, it is not a stretch to say that Facebook "controls" the media in deciding what to show, and how it is shown.

In this way, you could say that "Facebook Controls [a significant portion] of the Media in America"

"Media Filter"?

When distribution is bottle necked to a single or few locations, the difference between content creation and content consumption blurs significantly. If its not distributed - its not seen. The same net effect as not ever being created.

Absolutely. The value of media is solely in distribution, irrespective of the original source. Distribution is kind of baked into the definition.

A term like "media filter" only has value in distinguishing between "traditional" media and companies like Facebook. But, strictly speaking, Facebook is as much the media as traditional outlets and, in this context, those outlets are merely sources for Facebook.

But, their algo determines what everyone sees in their timeline!

It is a channel.

With 2 billion viewers / readers / listeners.

The two billion figure is not an accurate one. Two billion users (not individual persons) rely entirely on Facebook as their primary source of news. I don't think the relevant figure is more than a few millions.

I'm sorry, but what part of this are you disagreeing with?

That Facebook is a media channel?

That it doesn't in fact have 2 billion MUA, as claimed?

https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/27/facebook-2-billion-users/

That some other channel is more significant?

That there is another information channel to which a similar number of people dedicate 50 minutes of attention to daily?

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/06/business/facebook-bends-t...

"I don't think" is ... a rather weak level of substantiation.

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