The media isn't being too aggressive now: they've been too lenient for the previous decade. The outrage has finally caught up with the outrageous reality.
This is something I've not really been able to understand about those who defend Facebook against these "attacks". Nothing reported (AFAIK) has been untrue. Facebook is one of the richest and most culturally central companies of the 21st century. It seems fair game to examine what they do.
"Facebook allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent, the records show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages." [0]
Netflix and Spotify have Messenger plugins that allow you to share movie trailers and songs from directly within the Messenger app. Spotify's desktop app also used to connect with Messenger to enable similar functionality. NYT equated having standard "read/write" permissions necessary for basic app functionality with Netflix and Spotify being able to access, store, and modify all of your private messages.
Read the comments on that article and any prior discussion of it on the internet and you'll see that many technology illiterate people misinterpreted what that meant.
Also, it's fair game to examine what Facebook has been doing, but it's also fair game to examine what NYT's motives are for scrutinizing them so closely. When Google, Twitter, Equifax, and others have been largely ignored one naturally begins to wonder if there's an underlying agenda at play.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/technology/facebook-priva...
The point isn't that somebody at Spotify was sitting there reading everyone's messages. The point is that they could have been doing that, and Facebook had nothing in place to know if they were doing that, and none of the users sharing a song with friends would think that doing so would enable them to do that, and such extensive privileges were not necessary to implement a simple sharing feature.
What do I see as the real issue with FB (and Instagram in particular)? It rots people's brains out. It's like crack. I know multiple people spending their life savings to travel the globe for the perfect Instagram shot. I know many, many relationships that have been utterly destroyed by Facebook. Turns out staying connected to all of your ex-partners on a social network kinda makes it hard to get into new relationships. Facebook has been an absolute blight on humanity, just not for the reasons the mass media tells you.
It's not just facebook. Google, Twitter and Reddit have also faced tremendous media pressure. Facebook gets most of the attention because they are by far the largest social media player.
For all the talk about how powerful tech companies are, traditional media is proving they are no slouches. Of course traditional media has far greater political backing so you could say they have an unfair advantage.
All we can do is have ourselves some popcorn and watch the entertainment. One thing that perplexes me is why the social media companies don't band together and help each other from these politically motivated attacks. There is strength in numbers and they'd be able to fend off these attacks better if they acted together. Maybe the tech environment is just too competitive for that?