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Comment by ren_engineer | Hacker News Reader

true, most FB users really don't care. This is the media being wrapped in their own bubble yet again, they personally care a lot so this story gets a ton of media attention.

I've seen a few people point out that the MSM is actually mad because FB really has the same business model, they are just far more effective and profitable at implementing it. MSM has been pushing controversial stories for decades to boost their ratings, FB just used algorithms to do it rather than humans.

At its core this is about the traditional media's profit margins and cultural power being eaten up by FB and tech in general

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> I've seen a few people point out that the MSM is actually mad because FB really has the same business model

Facebook themselves have been pushing this angle so they’re probably very grateful any time someone repeats it!

It’s very convenient because it allows them to dismiss pretty much any reporting about them as biased. In reality though, the source of this story, NY Times, is more profitable than it’s been in a long time and the majority of that profit is coming from subscriptions, not ads. ProPublica, a non profit with zero ads has also done some excellent work covering Facebook. They don’t have the same business model as FB and never have.

This isn’t true for every media outlet out there but to write off any critical coverage of FB because “it’s the media” feels wildly shortsighted to me. The advice is “consider the source” not “dismiss based on the source”.

At this point I think the hate from journalists toward social media and tech more broadly is better described as "cultural" than literal economic self-interest. If you're a journalist, most of your colleagues believe everything they read in the news and therefore sincerely think FB is somewhere between "at least as evil as its size alone would predict given the typical progressive perception of large companies" and "just cartoonishly evil", so unless you're unusually indepedent-minded that's probably what you'll believe too.

“Hate” feels like a strange word to employ here. Is the reporting false? You seem to be suggesting that it is (“they sincerely believe”) but I’m yet to see a rebuttal to the revelations in the Facebook papers. There’s a trove of leaked internal documents. Are they faked?

I think there’s a reflexive kind of “independent” mindedness that’s actually very collective: the assumption that everything the mass media publishes is false. The correct independent minded approach is to examine the evidence provided. From my analysis I’m not sure what’s fake here.

As usual, the reporting I've seen hasn't involved any provably false claims that I've noticed, but it's been framed and selectively reported in such a way (again, probably mostly-sincerely) that most readers end up very misled. e.g., I think the internal study that found that a small fraction of teenagers reporting suicidal ideation said that the first trigger that came to mind was stuff they saw on Instagram on a survey was just insanely over-interpreted to mean that a world without Instagram would have less misery in teenagers, and I think that FB's decision to decline to publish a finding of an internal study that'll be predictably over-interepted in the media isn't really described well as a "cover up".

"Hate" in the sense of "ideologues being haters as usual", not like "KKK members".

It's like people forgot the war that old media waged on blogs in the early 2000's. It's never been a secret that old media hasn't been able to deal with the implications of a internet connected world would bring.

>old media waged on blogs in the early 2000's

That seems overblown. I can remember individual writers doing opinion pieces that, especially in retrospect, had a certain "Kids need to get off my lawn" quality to them. Various online traditional news pubs also tried to plug into the "blogosphere" in various ways.

But none of this really rose to the level of a war.

most FB users really don't care

Most FB users don't matter.

The people who do matter are the advertisers, and by most accounts a lot of them are very unhappy (for a range of reasons, and mostly not about whatever the latest "PR crisis" is.)

I doubt even the MSM believes this. They are throwing stuff at the wall, seeing if something ever sticks. I guess it's the only way they can come up with to save their business.

It would be funny if Facebook just launched their own news organization and used it to drag MSM through the mud all day. There's endless content to work with to that end. I'd rather see them eliminate each other.

“Most people don’t care” isn’t a reason not to fix a problem.

Most people don’t care about data privacy.

Most people don’t care about usurious payday loans.

Most people don’t care about wetlands preservation.

Most people don’t care about search-and-seizure abuses.

> the MSM is actually mad because FB really has the same business model

How are the two models similar?

> they personally care a lot so this story gets a ton of media attention.

Exactly, conveniently they are over dramatizing a story about their main competitor on the advertisement dollars market.

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