Damned if they do, damned if they don't. Personally, I feel that a lot of this hate towards Facebook is done by media types who are jealous that Facebook has stolen their role as a place to find news, no matter if it's fake or real.
Most other tech companies (especially the ones still in the "hustling" phase) are just as bad as FB if not worse. It's starting to feel like a coordinated smear campaign, even if all of it is accurate.
All the EULA legalese that companies use to enforce their will could be turned in the opposite direction and we'd found out it's real worth -- I can dictate how FB uses the data they pull from my server just like they try, to the extent that anyone can tell someone else what to do with data instead of having near zero power as people who live in non-GDPR regions do now.
I mean I don't think this kind of scheme would actually work but I can still dream.
I don't get it. If it's all accurate then what is the problem exactly? That all the anger is directed at FB? They are the largest social media company, and in the good times I have never heard them say "but other social media companies deserve some love too". Running a business is not supposed to be easy.
Selective reporting is a huge problem. You can distort almost any topic by selectively reporting only truthful things.
Again, I'm not defending Facebook, but it's pretty peculiar -- they just seem to have been in hot water every day for the last few months. Maybe it's a vicious PR cycle where regular media outlets are now being incentivized to report on FB's negative press because that's what's getting clicks.... because negative press is being produced.
[EDIT] wanted to add that this is part of how people get sucked into conspiracy theories... No one has time to verify and fact-check every single fact, and editors/media outlets are doing it less and less these days. A few lies mixed in with a bunch of facts are sometimes really hard to find but can have lasting impacts on your world view/view of some subject. Of course, sometimes conspiracy theories, outlandish-seeming claims, and smear jobs are sometimes true and justified.
You mean like, determining what users see on their timelines?
"Others are just as bad" may be true, but they largely (barring Google/Amazon/etc.) don't have the power Facebook does.
"Facebook Gives People A Voice in France" - or something along those lines, a few years ago, if the Arab Spring is anything to go by.
The writer's perspective very much matters in this type of articles. It's especially obvious in politics (although many people still don't notice it, and think they are just being served "the facts").
That said, I'll hardly spill a tear over people "over-criticizing" Facebook. If there's one company that's worthy of waves and waves of criticism, Facebook certainly qualifies for that role.
It certainly deserves it more than Tesla, which, with the exception of the criticism of the reckless promotion and implementation of Autopilot, I think the criticism of Tesla lately has been largely off-base and undeserved.
But for some reason, people seem to assume that both good news and bad news should be delivered evenly throughout the year, or something. Like they get surprised when there's a lot of bad news/negative press continuing for many months about something (whether it's Tesla, Facebook, or cryptocurrencies), but forget the same has been true about the good news about those things in the past, too. The good and bad news are almost never evenly distributed over a period of time. They are far more likely to come in bursts of either positive or negative stories.
Not long ago, I remember reading on this very site comments dismissing the idea that Facebook will suffer over the Cambridge Analytica. I said then that Facebook will likely not see an immediate effect, but will likely see it over the long term, when it starts declining, the Cambridge Analytica will be one of the reasons for that decline.
All of these negative news stories you see now are connected to the Cambridge Analytica story, which seems to have opened a kind of "Pandora's box" for Facebook. It's all downhill from here for Facebook. Some people just haven't realized it yet.
Instead of spotting the market, buying up the company who built it and slapping a fee on "unlimited music for a month" (a la Spotify), they sought to legislate it out of existence and in turn had their lunch eaten for them.
Dinosaurs trying to avoid the asteroid.
The gilets jaunes is not a political movement, it's a fuck you movement. Like many of Trump's electors in the USA, like Bolsonaro's electors in Brazil, like many of the M5S electors in Italy. Populists and fascists always have a simple answer to everybody's problem, if we can't give the people a solution, they will, and they'll win.
Greed is killing us all. It's killing the climate, it's killing democracy, it's going to be the end of us. Merry Christmas everyone!
Facebook is indeed a huge distribution model, one that's defective and one that's become a vector for disinformation. That is newsworthy, it's one of the biggest and most interesting media stories of the past half century.
Facebook's reach is why it's newsworthy, but Facebook's actions (and inactions) are why you hear more about them than Google, etc.