How Facebook Is Changing the Way Its Users Consume Journalism

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/27/business/media/how-facebook-is-changing-the-way-its-users-consume-journalism.html?referrer=&_r=1

by Celsus • 12 years ago

79 33 12 years ago

nytimes.com

ihsw• 12 years ago

Ah yes, the "unfollow from blah.com" feature gets very thoroughly used by me.

There has been a massive influx of hopeless and useless junk in my Facebook feed. Why do I need to click it off? Why isn't it opt-in?

batiudrami2• 12 years ago

It's just a phase. We had shitty profile apps, shitty quiz apps, shitty social game apps, shitty "like to see this stupid picture" pages, shitty bit strips, and currently we have shitty videos and pictures being shared by radio stations and clickbait sites. This too shall pass.

That said, I have a Facebook group with just my friends in it, where we organise social events, share interesting stuff and just generally shoot the shit. It's exactly what I want Facebook to be - no junk, no ads, no brands marketing to me, and no one cultivating their social presence. Just a couple of posts a day and a bunch of follow up comments from my (real) friends.

Apocryphon• 12 years ago

Ultimately, I think that core FB experience is what will allow the site to last- the most direct person-to-person experience, of using it as simply a method of communication between people who know each other well in real life. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how that can be monetized, unless the site was to offer a paid subscription to this "True Facebook" in some dark dytopian future.

bigbugbag3• 12 years ago

Are you aware that this facebook group of yours is what old timers called an IRC chan ?

xnull2guest2• 12 years ago

It isn't just about what users 'might want to read'. Between experiments done that changed election results in the 2010 Congressional Elections ("Here we report results from a randomized controlled trial of political mobilization messages delivered to 61 million Facebook users during the 2010 US congressional elections. The results show that the messages directly influenced self-expression, information seeking, and real world voting behavior of millions of people. Furthermore the messages not only influenced the users who received them but also the users' friends, and friends of friends."), the Facebook emotion experiment with direct financial ties to the DARPA Minerva Initiative, and partnered censorship, and censorship partnerships with governments worldwide I don't trust Facebooks to be stewards of the information I'm encouraged to read.

http://jhfowler.ucsd.edu/massive_turnout.pdf

https://stallman.org/facebook.html

userbinator• 12 years ago

Indeed, I see Facebook's "recommendations" and content filtering (which they innocuously refer to as "personalisation") as being nothing more than instruments of persuasion and control. Facebook is just one example but they are not alone - Google is the other big one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble

vdaniuk• 12 years ago

Do you also consider HN voting and flagging system to be nothing more than instruments of persuasion and control?

judk• 12 years ago

You misrepresent the voting story. Facebook did a GOTV campaign that motivated an apathetic 0.14% of the population to vote.

It was one of many many election advertising campaigns that influenced voters, and wasn't biased beyond the general leanings of its user base, which is already a majority of voters.

xnull2guest2• 12 years ago

The paper in question addresses the first criticism (of numbers).

"However, the ability to reach large populations online means that even small effects could yield behaviour changes for millions of people. Furthermore, as many elections are competitive, these changes could affect electoral outcomes. For example, in the 2000 US presidential election, George Bush beat Al Gore in Florida by 537 votes (less than 0.01% of votes cast in Florida). Had Gore won Florida, he would have won the election"

"To put these results in context, it is important to note that turnout has been steadily increasing in recent US midterm elections, from 36.3% of the voting age population in 2002 to 37.2% in 2006, and to 37.8% in 2010. Our results suggest that the Facebook social message increased turnout directly by about 60,000 voters and indirectly through social contagion by another 280,000 voters, for a total of 340,000 additional votes. That represents about 0.14% of the voting age population of about 236 million in 2010. However, this estimate does not include the effect of the treatment on Facebook users who were registered to vote but who we could not match because of nicknames, typographical errors, and so on. It would be complex to estimate the number of users on Facebook who are in the voter record but unmatchable, and it is not clear whether treatment effects would be of the same magnitude for these individuals, so we restrict our estimate to the matched group that we were able to sample and observe. This means it is possible that more of the 0.60% growth in turnout between 2006 and 2010 might have been caused by a single message on Facebook."

It's important to note that 0.14% of the population is the small number. It was 0.6% of the mobilized voting population and they got these results messaging 1/6 of the population. Furthermore they only report on effects that they could track and so all numbers are lower bounds.

tokenadult• 12 years ago

It may be that the article correctly reports the majority experience of Facebook users. I try to be an outlier, and to bring in part of the Hacker News culture of recommending good links rather than crap links to my Facebook wall. If I see crap links from my friends on my Facebook wall, then I reply by calling out the crap in them (linking to Snopes or a better news source for debunking, or identifying bias in certain sources, or whatever). Several of my friends have told me that they appreciate that some of the sources they have heard about (from other friends of theirs, no doubt) are crap, and many have told me that now my posts to Facebook are essentially their news aggregator. I get stories from all over about all kinds of topics, and I post those that I find most interesting to my Facebook wall, with visibility set to "friends only" by default. The best stuff I see over on Facebook from my friends is one source of some of what I submit here to Hacker News. I try to build good online communities by learning from other good online communities. My subset of all the bajillion posts on Facebook is unlike anyone else's, but it works for me.

AFTER EDIT: Encouraging, as I do both here on Hacker News and on Facebook, informative disagreement, I'd be very delighted to hear an explanation for the early downvote this comment received. What did you not like about it? How does your experience with Facebook differ from mine, and what is your view of the article kindly submitted here?

Vraxx• 12 years ago

I have a friend who does a very similar thing on Facebook who is definitely a large influence on the news I read. I'd estimate that person accounts for 90% of the news I read on FB, and threads on a source he posted are almost always thoughtful and worth reading. I definitely believe that this is an effective method of cultivating a community that isn't deaf to opposing view points. Keep up the good work!

vonklaus• 12 years ago

Ben Smith, editor in chief of BuzzFeed, a news and entertainment site, said his rule for writing and reporting in a fragmented age is simple: “no filler.” News organizations that still publish a print edition, he said, have slots — physical holes on paper or virtual ones on a home page — that result in the publication of stories that are not necessarily the most interesting or timely, but are required to fill the space. It was partly to discourage such slot-filling that BuzzFeed did not focus on its home page when it first started, he said.

In summation, buzzfeed has a commitment to only report current events, and the most interesting and thought provoking content. They have a strict "no filler" mandate and a commitment to only report important news stories.

Not sure this guy has ever even read buzzfeed

netcan• 12 years ago

Regardless of buzzfeed's standards for "thought provoking" and the superficial irony, I think there's a point here. But, I think it's only half the equation.

Filler is pointless. But, an even more important point is depth. If someone has an interesting point of view on anything from ISIS in Iraq, post conflict Russia-Ukraine relations to the medium term implications of lower oil costs on energy exporting economies of South American there is an unlimited level of depth that a reader may want to get into. IE, there's a place for recent facts in headlines, there is a place for two minute commentary. But, there is also room for people to jump into far more depth.

Whether in print of on video, those talking heads frame a battling for 12 second soundbites in a battle of of cliche and shallow wit are now pointless. If people want to engage deeper, there is no page limit.

goblin89• 12 years ago

“Are you creating content for the way that content is consumed in this environment?”

The terms “content” and “consumption” in this context make me cringe. I know it’s arguing over connotations, but I think they frame the matter in an unfortunate way. On the other hand, they’re telling.

The content you speak of might be good journalism. It could even be art. However, it could also be shitty journalism, it could in fact be advertising copy, perhaps it's just some words designed to generate ad revenue. The word is wonderfully ambiguous.

ivanche• 12 years ago

Ditto. I don't "consume" journalism, I read newspapers. I don't "consume" music, I listen musicians I like. I don't "consume" movies, I watch them. Etc.

Honestly I wish that all this "consume" thing would disappear soon...

mkal_tsr• 12 years ago

It's why click-bait brings in revenue - easy to consume, digest, and cast-back to the masses. I know The Guardian was working with an off-shoot (or maybe it was just an investment) for crowd-sourced journalism, but even that will have it's own biases and trends (in the long run ... initially I'm sure it'll do fine).

klunger• 12 years ago

I think the user created "echo chamber" is a real problem that is mentioned in passing here, but not really addressed.

Many times, friends have told me that they either hid or simply unfriended connections that posted political or ideological viewpoints which differed from their own. Although I try to keep my feed diverse, I admit to doing the same for the particularly extreme posters.

It suspect this is one of several factors in the increased partisan polarization and really should be studied further.

emotionalcode• 12 years ago

I don't think that particular behavior is any different than how people naturally select and maintain social groups, though. Some level of homogeneity is necessary for discourse (common language), let alone civil discourse.

I tend to think that people divide because they can't relate on a conceptual/experiential level; they begin with different perceptive assumptions. That's just a theory, though.

VLM• 12 years ago

"Although I try to keep my feed diverse"

Why support someone else's "grassroots" advertising model?

On the other hand, I have some FB friends who at least appear rational and interesting as long as you don't see any post containing Obama, Marxist, Kenyan, Job Creator, and a couple other key phrases. Keyword blocking would be an interesting feature to add to the "I don't want to see this" menu that is already present in FB. Add an option "contains keywords" and then select predetermined keywords.

One interesting side effect is likely to be an explosion of vocabulary. Once I block the obvious keyphrases above, I'll just have a newsfeed spammed with 'bama, Stalinist, African, and anticapitalist. I'm not sure that would be an improvement. Or it'll look like modern spam with weirdly spelled words.

marban• 12 years ago

Related plug: http://popist.com — launching shortly.

andygambles• 12 years ago

It is simply old school newspaper political bias entering the digital arena. Most papers are know for being left or right.

Facebook allows our peers/friends to influence what it thinks our preferences are. Therefore we are now becoming more influenced by those around us and possibly dulling the ability to form our own opinions.

ap222132• 12 years ago

When Slobodan Milošević was once asked why he didn't ban free speech he responded something like, 'I control the television, and that's all that matters.'

In today's world, when one controls the internet, that's all that matters.

_nwio• 12 years ago

Where did you see that quote? It doesn't sound right.

From WikiPedia: ''Upon the creation of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Milošević's government engaged in reforms to the Serbian Penal Code regarding restrictions on free speech, which were seen by critics as highly authoritarian. In particular Article 98 of the Serbian Penal Code during the 1990s punished imprisonment of up to three years for the following: "...public ridicule [of] the Republic of Serbia or another Republic within the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, their flag, coat of arms or anthem, their presidencies, assemblies or executive councils, the president of the executive council in connection with the performance of their office..."[65]''

ap222132• 12 years ago

Something I read a long time ago, in the 90s. That's why I had to paraphrase. The context of the question was in regard to why he wasn't cracking down on newspapers.

How Facebook Is Changing the Way Its Users Consume Journalism

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