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Friday, March 29, 2024

The news on Facebook

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Social media giant Facebook has changed the way people connect. It has redefined the words “friend” and “share,” and has allowed its users to establish and maintain relationships even without the benefit of face-to-face interaction.

But it has also changed the landscape of how information is brought from source to consumer.

In an op-ed for The New York Times, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledges that the internet has drastically altered the business model of the news industry. “Advertising revenue that used to support journalism now goes to companies like mine,” he writes. “We have a plan to help fix that.”

The news on Facebook

That plan is to include an in-app tab dedicated to “high-quality journalism.” Adds Zuckerberg: “For the first time, there will be a place in the Facebook app dedicated solely to high-quality news. Because people are still better at picking out the most important and highest-quality stories, the top stories in Facebook News will be curated by a team of diverse and seasoned journalists.”

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The feature was rolled out in select US cities on Friday.

By using the term “high-quality journalism,” Facebook implicitly acknowledges the existence of “low quality journalism.” And indeed it has been roundly criticized for allowing itself, for so many years, to act as a platform for disinformation and hate speech. For far too long, Facebook has washed its hands of the responsibility of ensuring that it carries only legitimate information.

Given the sheer amount of information Facebook has on every single user—as of the second quarter of this year, it has 2.41 billion—it has, wittingly or unwittingly, been instrumental in furthering other entities’ dark designs. Some companies have harvested data points to target advertisements and propaganda. The company has many sins to atone for, and this, we hope, is just the beginning of a consistent effort to thwart the exploitation of technology for purposes not contemplated in the beginning.

People have grown accustomed to getting their news from Facebook instead of going directly to legitimate news web sites. This is skewed at the outset, because users are already limited to the information that their own circle of friends are sharing. Zuckerberg says the news feature will direct readers to the original, legitimate source of the stories, so that they can get the entire picture of how things are, instead of how bits and pieces have been curated based on the data points they give out about themselves.

Facebook’s latest move is just one way to combat fake news. The real enemy is users’ lack of circumspection about the news they get and how they receive it. Social media is not a bad thing—it has done wonders to the way people connect with each other. Still, the pitfalls are real, and the only way users can protect themselves is to be recognize all the dangers, so that they can give and receive information deliberately.

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