Roy Greenslade has an article on the Facebookisation of news that appears on the Guardian. 'Why Facebook is public enemy number one for newspapers, and journalism.'
Deeply concerning stuff.
It does confirm my overall distrust of 'social media'.
The following is from Greenslade's article.
It has always been the case from the dawn of media that the controllers of news outlets - newspapers, TV and radio, online - make choices about what to publish and, more significantly, what not to publish. So is there a real need to be especially concerned about Facebook?
Yes, writes the Guardian’s Jemima Kiss in the latest issue of the British Journalism Review. In her article, “A giant that may eat us”, she contends that the world’s leading social media site is exerting both an “increasing domination of internet advertising revenue and control of a significant part of a critical distribution platform.”
And further
Users “willingly pour endless personal information about themselves into Facebook” and that enables the site “to sell targeted advertising around them.”
So what?
Before cynics shout about that not being a bad thing (while digital optimists assert that independent, and therefore better, journalism will arise in its place), think of the perils we face without a collective of organised, skilled journalists working for organisations large enough to hold power to account.
The Facebookisation of news has the potential to destabilise democracy by, first, controlling what we read and, second, by destroying the outlets that provide that material.
Yup. Reason enough to stay away from Facebook.
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