Imagine if Facebook or some other platform did that to news outlets they didn't like. I think people would be quite concerned.
If FB did the same to journalists, it certainly would be disturbing, because FB's customers are not its readers and it has no editorial firewall. Anything it says is hopelessly self-interested.
I think it is time people stop pretending news companies are any different from any other media companies. The NYTimes was created by one of the wealthiest bankers for christ's sakes.
Just the fact that they've been criticizing Facebook since before most of these scandals broke is proof that they're a check.
They're not perfect or without an agenda, but no human organization is. But they do make money and earn prestige from muckraking, so they do it. FB earns money from harming us in unnoticeable doses.
Modern example: Jared Kushner's father Charles bought The New York Observer just to get good press about himself to counteract all the illegal stuff he was doing (and was convicted of).
Kushner is now running the Trump White House, and is married to Ivanka Trump.
That's the "free press" for you!
Now let's see…who owns the Washington Post again?
The subtext to all of this is "people are weak" and need protection from their own powers of free association (your network is curated by you). It's one thing to say that people can't put marijuana into their bodies, but it's another to say I can't even handle the speech of my peers because it'll delude my sense of reality. Then how do you have faith in democracy?
Yes, people can’t handle the speech of their peers because some of their peers are specialists in messaging.
They’ve been doing it before the internet. Heck, America taught the world that facts don’t matter by concocting the anti-vaxx movement and creationism.
Both were designed, or happened, to target weakness in human thinking.
It’s a brave new world out there now with the internet.
Verification is harder than content generation. If I flood the right network then it’s members will also be influenced because their trusted sources are also going to be repeating similar ideas.
And yes, the speech of their peers is deluding their sense of reality, literally.
https://www.pnas.org/content/113/3/554
Hey, bread and circuses worked for Rome for a while didn’t it.
Edit: changed anti-vas’s to anti-vaxx
In today's age you cannot trust what a journalist says if they don't have proof that they can show you.
http://www.politico.com/pdf/PPM116_luntz.pdf
That is a reference document I would use to show people how to do messaging effectively.
While there may be people who can do that in the media as well, but in general this is a dark art suited to people who want to MAKE reality and not just report reality.