There is an intensive negative media campaign against Facebook lately, rightful or not.
Once a company (or individual) becomes a media target, the media generates its own news about the company.
At the same time, most media companies cannot admit this dynamic even if they understand it (they don't).
Things driven by advertising seem to become caricatures of themselves... My wife an I watched this happen to Food Network in the early 2010's.
People like Paula Dean, who acted normally, began to have deeper accents, brighter eyes, more ridiculous 'Southern' turns of phrase. And it wasn't just her. It happened to other personalities as well.
In fact, I think that people have pointed out this phenomena on YouTube, as well (people conforming to some 'norm' that gets them the most cash).
I don't think much has changed from FB's behaviour, nor is there a coordinated media campaign against them. Rather, the general public is warming up to the idea that FB might not be all that great, which opens a window for the media to publish stories about FB in a negative light.
Given this, it seems disingenuous and even harmful to attribute the negativity side of it to the “media” or suggest that the coordination and timing of the stories is a media “campaign.”
Nobody denies that the media can coordinate like this and probably has in the past and will again. However, there is no need to reach for conspiracy theories when it comes to negative reporting on Facebook.
Facebook is negative. Facebook has perpetrated a serial campaign of negative behaviors. The media in this case are merely just reporting that. Any negativity is down to Facebook itself for acting negatively, not down to the media.
Reporters when doing an interest story will as part of their job research further into the subject. Facebook just happens to have a really long trail of SV mentality of move fast and deal with the consequences later. It's Facebook's fault for making themselves really interesting before cleaning themselves.
Can you really blame reporters doing their job, researching an interesting subject, and one that has so much dirt that it's easy to do your job.
This is the same kind of logic as thinking that everything some CEO does is a "marketing ploy", or that every terrorist attack is a false flag operation.
It was more or less the same [edit: data / service] Facebook provided to Obama's both campaigns, except selling to Obama was seen as "supporting progressive cause" and "modern way of reaching out to the young voters", while selling to Trump was deemed a "terrible betrayal" and "hacking the democracy"; the press' opinion on Facebook turned from "that dependably progressive company we can get mutual support from" to "that unpredictable hired gun that's willing to work with anybody bad".
Think of it; nothing else has changed. The press, and people in general, were well aware for years that Facebook is collecting, processing, and selling reams upon reams of user data. It was all glossed over as long as it was supporting the good cause. Now it's bemoaned to no end.
It doesn't help that the press has natural adversarial relationship with Facebook just as much as with Google and other similar, due to the platforms being both major news channel (direct competitor), while at the same time the major source of web traffic to the news' websites, thus ad revenue.
I'm pretty sure Obama didn't use a Russian troll farm during his campaigns.
In the post above I posit that's due to journalists at first assuming they are on the same team, bound by shared worldview, only to learn that Facebook is loyal to the profit first and foremost, and over any ideology.
Choice examples:
- the OP article; used to be "Facebook helps populist freedom movements a'la Arab Spring"; now is "Facebook helps populist violence a'la Gilets Jaunes"
- all the problems with privacy
- being faux-feminist (https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/facebook-s-sheryl-sandber...)
- catering to far-right (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/17/facebook-...)
- hosting "fake news" (https://www.fastcompany.com/90203347/facebook-can-never-stop...)
I wasn't aware we were discussing just that.
It took people a while to figure out the potential downsides of social media, press included.
Are you going to tell me that if Facebook is dragged before parliament and congress that the press is supposed to not cover that so as to appear 'fair' to facebook?
Those events are newsworthy and they are being covered.
As far as privacy concerns, they seem legitimate to me, and also newsworthy to the layman, who may not have considered the side effects of using a voluntary surveillance platform such as facebook.
(Also I never really understood the urge to defend the powerful. Powerful organizations like facebook don't need our moral or material support.)
We are in agreement that the press should hold Facebook and other powerful players to account.
My point of interest is why (in my memory) the press was at first covering up for Facebook only to rather abruptly turn into harsh, pervasive criticism against it. It seems to be a repeating pattern in the industry, in which an upstart ran by a dashing founder is for a long while the darling of the media only to suddenly find itself at the receiving end of relentless criticism.
Sure Facebook deserves a lot of criticism for their various underhanded and harmful actions; perhaps even the negatives outweight the positives overall. I am asking, where was the criticism early on? Why was Facebook a darling of the media for so long, before it all changed?
I don't think there is a big grand plan behind the arc in the coverage.
In the early days of these companies, the iconoclast story was simply easier to write.
Also, you have to know how journalists work. Outside of opinion pieces and editorials, a journalist needs preferably two sources to make a claim in a news piece.
In the early days, there simply were fewer critics of facebook or Uber, and certainly the critics were less organized, so they didn't get much coverage.
But, I bet if you look back to the first days of facebook, that you will find some negative coverage, but at that time it would have appeared speculative, and would have been a minority voice.
Also, it's right there in the word: "news". Somebody getting rich off a new idea is news. Just like cavemen would have considered it news that you can eat the orange berries if you cook them first.
Novel risks are also a staple of news. So perhaps the arc went from 'Man gets rich with crazy new idea', to 'People using new thing face a novel risk' (surveillance, loss of privacy).
Why do you guys keep saying that, if it's all but speculation? You're stating that as a fact.
My impression is the journalists used to give Facebook a pass on many, many well-known bad behaviors. Atrocious behaviors, even. And then it changed, and they would go to great lengths to point out all the faults of Facebook.
I experienced the change as a rather abrupt flip, right around the times of the Cambridge Analytica kerfuffle.
I gauge it as journalists at first considering Facebook a friend that stumbles and is worth covering, but then feeling betrayed and instead perceiving Facebook as a dangerous enemy that needs to be taken down.
Just like user gerbilly in the other post you use whataboutism of assigning blame to presidential candidates. . While interesting point, that detracts us from considering when and why the journalists changed their perception of Facebook.
edit: Just to wrap up the very specific "targeting unknowing users with fake news in order to influence the outcome of a election", that's one of the points Facebook raised themselves around that time, were very adamant they are working on fixing it and will fix it. They deployed various mechanisms, including flagging certain news and linking to factcheckers (IIRC). Long story short, that was one of the very few things where Facebook and the journalists (and to large extent the political class) are in agreement, and working together to sort out.
You're forgetting about the part where Cambridge Analytica obtained data erroneously through a Facebook API.
Uber didn't change much, and so won't Facebook, because the media will eventually pick another target (I wonder which, I'm guessing Google) which makes people click their links. They don't really care about reporting or about making things right, they just need a dead horse to beat.
I am happy the power of the media dwindles year after year, they should have no right to do something like this against certain people or companies they don't like. They are bullies, that's all they are.
Then they got caught doing (or not) interesting things. Meaning any competent reporter will find LOTS if SV style mistakes when researching the original story.
This is just what happens to anyone/thing that leaves a trail of interesting-ness after they appear in the media the first time. Do you really expect reporters to not report on things they find, or maybe you're asking reporters to be worse at research.
Self driving car division is dead in the water. They will end up licensing tech and competing with Waymo.