Facebook’s retreat from the news business | Hacker News Reader

Facebook’s retreat from the news business

slate.com

111 pointsblatherard28 comments

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What if facebook isnt trying to get rid of the media? What if that is actually users being sick of it?

Mind you facebook has driven me to the point I stopped using it entirely.

You mean the media or Facebook?

If Facebook, then why do they keep growing their user base quarter over quarter?

Don’t underestimate the bubble you are in and extrapolating that to global scale!

Facebook is here to stay for the time being, whether you personally choose to use it or not!

You're cherrypicking one metric with a nonchalance that Facebook's investors surely do not share. FB is experiencing its slowest global user growth ever, and US users are declining.

Popular/media criticism and boycotting actually appear to be making an impact in the west, along with an inevitable generation shift (young'uns just aren't thrilled about sharing a social platform with Mom and Gramps).

Having failed at doing news in a way that users liked, it makes sense for FB to pull out. Most of their new users are in countries with poor education systems or regimes that censor the news. News is an awkward business to be in under those conditions anyway.

None of this is surprising at all once you've seen multiple product cycles, markets do in fact matter, no company rules forever, if your product is total crap people will drift away from it, this time is almost never different. Friendster died, Myspace died, etc. FB can go the same way if they mis-execute badly enough (though it could certainly take decades especially in their strongest markets).

I've really slowed using Facebook because of the amount of misinformation or straight up lies by some acquaintance. Comments on any kind of news source are pretty bad as well. So many lies just made the platform unusable for me.

It's quite remarkable really how tone deaf the product planning at Facebook has been. For centuries thousands of families have deemed it a wise decision to forbid politics as a discussion topic at the dinner table. Zuck jumps right in the middle of the table and "connects the world" by shoving Trump articles with unmoderated comment threads in all their faces. Because an A/B test showed that it "promoted engagement." Such idiocy lol.

I'd love to see a Facebook where either I or the page itself could hide/forbid comments. I'm sure that no news company would ever turn off comments on their pages but they might. A lot of companies have disabled comments on their websites.

I really don't care that some bloke thinks everything is a Zionist conspiracy to eradicate the white race. The smaller lies and falsehoods are what gets me even more.

It's basically the Gell-Mann amnesia affect on steroids:

"You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray [Gell-Mann]'s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the 'wet streets cause rain' stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."

They have WhatsApp for people to send pictures of the grandchild to grandma with everything being in a nice politics free bubble, safely disconnected from the 'real world' (of fake news) and 'likes'. Family group chats on WhatsApp is probably what a lot of people use now rather than the original Facebook product. This being the case they have been able to experiment a bit with how the monetize mainstream Facebook.

I don’t know where you read that US users are declining but based on the last earnings call it’s still growing!

Is it growing as fast as other regions? of course not! FB already captures some 80% of the US population...there isn’t much space to grow left! If from now one they loose some users a quarter and regain them the next quarter that is still amazing!

I don't know if this is necessarily the right thing to do, I understand that Facebook (and others) were really effectively weaponized by malicious foreign actors, but conceding by not participating in journalism feels wrong to me.

This is indicative of a larger question that I think we, as the tech industry, need to really ask ourselves: to what degree are the platforms responsible for fixing the ills of the connections between users. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, etc. are all Western businesses operating at international scales. Is it "right" for them to impose western approaches to journalism, "truth", civic engagement, digital literacy, etc. to the rest of the world?

If the answer is yes, we must come to the realization that these platforms cannot be impartial, if the answer is no, we must accept that we, as an industry, are going to complicit in the systematic harm of societies and must accept that as table stakes.

Now I don't think this is necessarily a zero-sum situation, Salesforce probably doesn't have the same kind of civic obligations that FB, Twitter, Google have; but the clear lines of engagement in the spectrum of SAAS companies needs to be discussed.

: to what degree are the platforms responsible for fixing the ills of the connections between users. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, etc. are all Western businesses operating at international scales. Is it "right" for them to impose western approaches to journalism, "truth", civic engagement, digital literacy, etc. to the rest of the world?

I'm unsure I understand the juxtaposition here, can you elaborate on the correlations you see between the responsibility of online platforms to 'fix' my friendships and the eagerness you see within those platforms to act and behave as components of the 4th estate?

It's possible I've read your post improperly and came away with the wrong impression, can you clarify what you mean? Thanks :)

For example, it could be the case than in a given country, a news article in which the son of a prominent CEO does something socially embarrassing relative to that culture (perhaps he didn't get into a top university and instead attends a community college) which causes enough public outcry that he resigns. Is it right for Twitter, Facebook, etc. to push up comments and reactions, via machine learning algorithms or whatever, that bias more towards western (read: American) values about what is considered social outrage?

Conversely, what if ideas about corruption are treated differently in different countries. If it is the case that it is socially expected/accepted to pay officials for certain services, is it right for a western tech company to promote comments/content that show dissent and value western values over the local ones?

No you're right, that's a valid question but I read your post as having two very good questions seemingly juxtaposed as being asked to raise a singular point. In one sentence you talked about social networking and what it means for connections among friends, the very next question you asked about social media and what it means as an arbiter of information about the world we inhabit.

Was I mistaken to read those two separate inquiries as being of the same cloth? That's where I got confused and was wondering if you could help me understand your point a little better.

My coalescing point is that I see Facebook pulling back out of the news space as choosing to not play the game at all, that it is not a battle that they necessarily want to play because of the moral quagmire I outlined above. I don't think that this is a good choice because it doesn't engage with useful questions but just kicks the can down the road for another company, maybe even another generation, to deal with.

Thank you for bringing up how confusing my point was, really appreciate it. :)

> Is it "right" for them to impose western approaches to journalism

It's largely a moot point.

Because no company is going to want to alienate themselves from three very large markets (EU, US, UK) all of whom have legal and political structures which govern journalistic behaviours.

What about the large market that is China?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall

Facebook found out that by participating in the news business, it necessarily must take sides in the political arguments between the left and the right.

I think Facebook figured it's not a battle they can win, because for the right, they seem to be abusing their power, and for the left they seem like they didn't do enough.

> really effectively weaponized by malicious foreign actors

The truth is that social media has been been used by a wide variety of state and non-state actors to push their respective agendas. Its false and misleading to suggest that somehow "our" governments aren't engaged in exactly the same type of propaganda - mostly to a much greater degree.

>Is it "right" for them to impose western approaches to journalism, "truth", civic engagement, digital literacy, etc. to the rest of the world?

I'm not sure what sort of journalism you are referring too, but "western journalism" as it exists in the form of legacy or "corporate" media has absolutely nothing to do with truth, civic engagement, or corporate literacy. Its a non-stop barrage of propaganda, just like most "news" channels based in other countries are non-stop barrages of propaganda from a different perspective. Pretending that western governments, particularly the US government, haven't actively sought to spread propaganda and control the narrative for over a century is to betray a stunning ignorance of history.

I think the larger question for those in tech needs to be, to what degree will they allow various nations and states to control and influence the speech on their platforms? The free and unfettered exchange of information is going to be potentially damaging to the official propaganda narrative pushed by every government. Unfortunately tech companies have to be based somewhere, and are always going to be subject to the draconian threats from governments no matter where they are based. To pretend that this doesn't happen in "the West" is again to ignore history. Go ask former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio what he thinks.

I wonder, given the grilling that Zuckerberg got the last year, if Google would rather avoid replacing them in the near-monopoly position of news gatekeeper. On the other hand, Twitter seems to be fine with it, since the Facebook pivot away from news might be what it is using to reverse its decline.

Would someone with knowledge care to comment what % of traffic disappears at each update. The last update pushed me over the edge to bing news of all things. Worse aggregation with a UI only as bad as gnews minus two major updates.

Curious too.

Are there any stats on this?

Btw, quit fb and havent needed to look back. replaced it with... HN, reddit, crappy twitter, instagram, and snapchat.

Instead of crappy twitter you could use Mastodon. It feels like Twitter in the early days. Of course, if you used "crappy twitter" as a nickname for Mastodon I'm not going to disagree with you.

I can't read that article because I have booked all cookies from slate.com, and it's using a cookie to store that I have consented to being tracked with cookies...

I do not consent to being tracked, but I do want to read the article.

Good. Everything wrong with non-subscription clickbait-driven news is amplified on Facebook. Very little is gained for that cost.

Google Cached version for all the EU members whom get the GDPR warning, with no option to opt out of anything.

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qvSt11...

Thanks! All I was seeing is:

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> Agree

Obviously I didn't agree even if I have all the extensions to block and delete ads, cookies and the like.

Kind of Slate's retreat from the news business.

Interesting. Maybe Facebook didn't like being dragged through the mud by news organizations. Maybe Facebook is hurting them back by asphyxiating them. I can't say I'd feel very bad about that if that were the case.

If you read the article, this trend began before the recent "Facebook is the devil" trend in the news. Perhaps instead it's the other way around? Perhaps the news organizations are trying to hurt FB for a drop in their readership?

Either way, the news and social media spaces do not have a healthy relationship.

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