Posted on 24 March 2018

First, a disclosure: I am a relatively early adopter of Facebook both personally and professionally. Definitely not a pioneer, but I was a university student when it first became available to people outside elite institutions and I set up the page for the radio show I currently work for, and do a lot of the posting to it.

And this decision was largely because this is where the people are. I also set up Google+ and Flickr and Soundcloud and Pinterest and Tumblr for the show but they are largely unused (Twitter still is, but not as much) because the audience engagement was found on Facebook.

But does this absolve me of responsibility? With so many eyes on the Cambridge Analytica scandal this week, and the general sense that Facebook is maybe not good for the world bubbling up over the past year or so, I’ve been wondering about the media’s role in Facebook’s rise, and I want to be clear that though I don’t think I likely played any major role in this, I don’t hold myself exempt, either.

I note that even on the Guardian website revealing how personal information was highjacked to influence major elections, readers are still given a “share to Facebook” button on the bottom of the article. I note that in podcasts questioning whether Facebook has spurred on a new dark age of fake news, people are still encouraged to “like” the page in order to get the latest. Media, generally, is deeply embedded in the Facebook ecosystem even as that same ecosystem contributes to outlet after outlet being killed off.

How many people, especially older people, only signed up for an account after hearing their favourite radio host tell them to follow along on Facebook so many times or seeing encouragement to comment not in the letters pages or on the website itself, but over on Facebook? Or being asked to share this important news with their network? From there, how many moved deeper into partisanship or conspiracy based on those algorithms and data targeting? I don’t know, but the possibility troubles me.

The relationship between media and advertisers has always been a complicated one– advertisers pay for journalists, and journalists create a product that contains ads that will be found by audiences. Now Facebook is the newspaper and media outlets are the advertisers, trying to use the platform to get eyeballs. The main difference is Facebook doesn’t pay for this placement, media gives it to them for free because media is used to being the platform, not the product. And in doing so, media surely played some role in helping make Facebook what it is today, for better or worse.

And yes, media is playing a lead role in trying to tell people what that means. But is that enough? Or do we need to embark on some deeper soul-searching in all this?

Filed under: media, social media, technology