12 ms·

Introducing: The Facebook Journalism Project

97 points by ents 10y ago

setra 10y ago
I'm sure this will be used for censoring political groups, and alternative media. As mainstream news sources become less popular / reputable they have really started pushing for methods to censor their opposition.
- Qworg 10y ago
  How do you draw the line between "alternative media" and "lies"?
  - Vaskivo 10y ago
    You shouldn't censor lies. You should prove that they are lies. [EDIT] (just to add something to my post) If you delete/ommit/censor lies youd end up with: a) If every lie is removed, maybe everything that was removed is a lie. Which is not true. b) You end up with a "cry wolf situation", which may blow up hardly on facebook. You don't "cry wolf". You show that the wolf is there. Otherwise, the first time you screw up, you will lose all credibility.
    - komali2 10y ago
      But people don't believe proof that a lie is a lie - see the entire Trump phenomena. All he has to do is Tweet "fake news," and people won't believe any attempts to rationalize.
      - Vaskivo 10y ago
        Just because it doesn't work perfectly it doesn't mean we shouldn't do the right thing. To me, the ends don't justify the means.
    - matt4077 10y ago
      There's this old saying: "You can't prove a negative". It's wrong in that you often can indeed prove a negative, but the idea is still useful. Example: What would it take to conclusively proof that I never killed anybody vs. that I did? For the former, you'd basically need a continuous video feed from my birth. (b) "hardly" means something other than what you're thinking. No worries, many Russians make that mistake when speaking english.
  - wfo 10y ago
    I could ask how you draw the line between "mainstream media" and "lies" just as easily and just as poignantly. The answer is easy in both cases. When they lie, it's a lie. When they don't, it's not.
    - oculusthrift 10y ago
      because "mainstream media" like nyt and wapo have well respected, educated journalists working around the clock to research stories and find evidence whereas "alternative media" is a guy in his moms basement making up stories. just as with science, people only dispute it when it goes against their own interests.
      - NoGravitas 10y ago
        That's quite an oversimplification. Your characterization of the alternative media is sometimes right (except that they're usually not making up stories -- they're usually summarizing stories produced by regular journalists, often with an editorial overlay). But there are also alternative media sources doing real research and investigative journalism, like Democracy Now! and the Intercept. On the other hand, the biggest, most respected of the mainstream publications, the NYT and the WaPo, have permanently tainted themselves by acting as stenographers for US government disinformation campaigns -- most notably in the run-up to the Iraq war, when they consistently promoted the fake WMD story.
        threeseed 10y ago
        The Iraq War happened well over a decade ago. And the New York Times et al all did internal reviews of their behaviour and made substantive changes. From Morning Joe, this morning, you can already see that the New York Times has learnt lessons from that era: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaI0u0ZdpMg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaI0u0ZdpMg So the idea that they should still after all this time be permanently tainted is ridiculous and frankly is just an excuse by those who have different political persuasions.
        10y ago
  - maxfurman 10y ago
    It's simple! If you want to believe it, it's "alternative media," and if you don't it's a filthy lie.
- collias 10y ago
  Exactly. Yesterday was a great example of mainstream sources losing credibility. They were all over the (as far as I know) totally unverified document that an intelligence agency decided to leak to Buzzfeed for some reason. They wonder why no one trusts them anymore...
  - ConfuciusSay02 10y ago
    The fact that mainstream journalists are caught letting political operatives write their articles for them doesn't help their credibility either. Oh, and they're of course silent when it comes to reporting on their own corruption.
    - collias 10y ago
      It reminds me of that clip of CNN saying that we could only get the Wikileaks emails through their interpretation, and we shouldn't be reading them ourselves. ...turns out it was because they were implicated in them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DcATG9Qy_A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DcATG9Qy_A
      - gspetr 10y ago
        CNN is so corrupt it looks like a parody network. Their most egregious breach of ethics to date: On October 31, 2016, the New York Times reported: "CNN has severed ties with the Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, after hacked emails from WikiLeaks showed that she shared questions for CNN-sponsored candidate events in advance with friends on Hillary Clinton's campaign." CNN said it had accepted her formal resignation on October 14, adding: "We are completely uncomfortable with what we have learned about her interactions with the Clinton campaign while she was a CNN contributor."
        threeseed 10y ago
        Donna Brazile shared questions with the candidates and CNN promptly terminated her position. What exactly did CNN do wrong here ? By your definition every company that has a employee who makes an egregious mistake is corrupt.
- lordCarbonFiber 10y ago
  To borrow the sentiment from Tim Minchin: if alternate news media was news it would just be called news.
- resfirestar 10y ago
  Why are you lot so reflexively opposed to anything related to journalism, even when explicitly aimed to help alternative media? It certainly doesn't make it look like you just want people to get news from more sources.
  - gspetr 10y ago
    How is Facebook, known to be biased[1] is going to "help alternative media"? This looks like a power play to regain smeared credibility under the guise of "people's platform". [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/05/09/former-facebook-staff-say-conservative-news-was-buried-raising-questions-about-its-political-influence/?utm_term=.bc318f964d4d https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/05/09/fo...
  - mattlevan 10y ago
    People, and hackers especially, generally don't "trust" Facebook to provide them with a platform to publish anymore. And why would they? Facebook will never open source the software responsible for determining what, when, and how people see news articles.
- sergiotapia 10y ago
  "Fake News" put some egg on their face and they're scrambling to find a way to censor alternative news.
randomgyatwork 10y ago
I get it, fake news is a problem because a new product is coming to solve the 'problem' of fake news.
- IIIIIIII 10y ago
  I wonder if the product will be a revamp of the old Facebook paper/reader-app ("all your contents are belong to us") honestly though I don't think FB/Zuck is quite so cynical yet
maxfurman 10y ago
This will not work, because the problem is not a lack of "news literacy," the problem is confirmation bias.
resfirestar 10y ago
I'm interested to see where the local news initiative goes. Big outlets have plenty of room to innovate with or without Facebook's help, but newspapers outside of state capitals seem to be in a difficult position of falling subscriptions and no way to replace that revenue online.
- patja 10y ago
  I am curious about your conclusion that some newspapers in state capitals are doing OK with subscriptions. Can you say more about which specific state capitals and newspapers you see as thriving? What do you see as different that is making newspapers in state capitals succeed where those in other cities are struggling?
  - maxfurman 10y ago
    Not the parent, but I think it just means some cities are big enough markets to support a locally-focused newspaper but most smaller cities and towns aren't. It's no secret that local papers are dying but for example the Philadelphia Inquirer is still around.
    - resfirestar 10y ago
      Exactly. Yes, the big papers are less profitable than before, but however much the LA Times complains about adblock they're not going out of business. My hometown paper, on the other hand, is having trouble affording to have the full staff of journalists they used to maintain, and hiring someone to modernize their online presence may be out of reach.
- the_watcher 10y ago
  The local news piece was by far the most interesting to me as well. Until recently, nearly all journalists got their starts in local news, and as Facebook correctly notes, it has the advantage of focusing on stories that actually impact the intended audience's day to day life. Also, since the readers are often closer to the actual events, players, and issues described, it's arguable that the readers are less susceptible to the opinion disguised as reporting that typifies much of partisan, new media (although I'll admit that this is arguable at best, and assumes that the readers actually want their reporting to be factual).
mattlevan 10y ago
Is there anything Zuckerberg doesn't want to get his company involved with? It's been said on HN again and again, but I'm really looking forward to a decentralized digital publishing platform that gains momentum and actually gives Facebook a run for its money. Anyone know of any such existing platforms up and running now? Last I looked into this, I discovered "Steemit", but it doesn't seem very promising.
- sogen 10y ago
  Old stuff I remember that used to live on the internets: mIRC, BBS, Usenet groups, Online Chat, Forums
  - mattlevan 10y ago
    Oh, yea. How could I forget? I still use IRC on a daily basis... I don't think of it as a place to read news, though.
    - Pigo 10y ago
      I get back on once in awhile just to see if people are going back. I'm wondering if any network is growing besides Freenet. Freenet is cool, and I get on for work once in awhile. But I really miss when Undernet and Dalnet where massive, with all sorts of stuff happening. Maybe I'm just out of touch with what the active networks are.
      - sogen 10y ago
        Maybe that's the future, going back eventually to alternative places where the user can have a separate identity and speak their opinions (I.e. Redddit)
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  I mean, there's always RSS, but that's always had the issue of adoption. Is Steemit just a Reddit clone with the blockchain buzzword sprinkled on?
jawns 10y ago
This is sort of like Amazon announcing that it wants to strengthen its partnership with mom-and-pop shops, and help those mom-and-pop shops sell products in new and innovative ways. I'm a former journalist who used to work for a metro daily newspaper that has long suffered, as most newspapers have, from declining ad revenue. For these papers, the only reason to partner with Facebook is because they feel they have little choice. They would much rather have a healthy revenue stream and be self-sufficient. But so far, the news industry has not found anything that adequately replaces the print-ad-driven business model that served it so well for so long. So they're willing to try just about anything -- including, apparently, accepting a dinner invitation from a reputed cannibal.
- cshenoy 10y ago
  Interesting. Who is the reputed cannibal or was that said in jest?
  - nerdponx 10y ago
    Facebook is the cannibal in this case I think.
  - trequartista 10y ago
    Facebook is the cannibal because it's eating the businesses of these newspapers
  - spdustin 10y ago
    It's used as a simile to anthropomorphize Facebook - FaceBook is like the cannibal that invites you, the business he's eating, over for dinner.
- save_ferris 10y ago
  This. I'm a back end dev at a small non-profit news org and it blows my mind how fast my employer wants us to integrate with FB instant articles and AMP without considering the consequences (AMP traffic staying in Google's network, etc.) Coming from a startup where our data was proprietary and execution meant everything, it feels weird sometimes that I get paid to make it as easy as possible for Google, FB, and others to access our content at scale (for free) while the news organization bears the infrastructure and engineering costs to do so. These big companies aren't in this to help media companies, they've successfully commoditized content production and demanded news organizations to get with their program or get buried and forgotten.
tucif 10y ago
I read this as if Facebook is posing itself to become kind of a "Journalism PaaS". That'd be an interesting shift.
Ghostium 10y ago
Introducing: The Facebook Censoring Project
- threeseed 10y ago
  Fine line between censorship and moderation.
  - ljk 10y ago
    pretty clear line: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/22/technology/facebook-censorship-tool-china.html?_r=0 https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/22/technology/facebook-censo... http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-38073949 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-38073949 http://www.forbes.com/sites/xiangwang/2016/11/24/doing-business-the-chinese-way-facebook-develops-a-censorship-tool/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/xiangwang/2016/11/24/doing-busin... list goes on
6stringmerc 10y ago
Notably absent: Any mention of compensating the "participants" that Facebook is, I'd wager, pitching behind-the-scenes as a gigantic pool of free talent / labor ripe for monetization both as advertising targets and content generators! Disclosure: I'm on Medium and don't get paid diddly for my writings on there, nor spend much of any time investing in the Facebook ecosystem because it reminds me too much of AOL.
- imh 10y ago
  I'd imagine that in a pay-per-whatever, traditional news orgs aren't going to beat clickbait trash orgs. They talked about trying to help the news orgs subscription funnel, which seems a better solution.
niftich 10y ago
Facebook wants to solidify being a content portal for news. Its competition is Google with AMP, Google and other search engines without AMP, and first-party content producers, and 'orthodox news aggregators'. Both Facebook and Google have an advantage: they have hyperlocal info and tons of data on users collected through their tracking and ad networks, they are two of the most-visited websites and most-used apps in the world; meanwhile they subsume all the advantages of an old-style news aggregator by having a wide variety of third-party content they never had to pay for. 'Emerging business models': Facebook is a large IdP containing identities that they monetize through data mining with the goal of display ads. But this IdP allows their users to log in to other sites and engage in microtransaction-like behavior. Aside from making actual payments to FB, users could trade off 'ad credits' or whatnot. Flattr, Webpass are in this space; Google tried this with Contributor [1], which is about to see a revamp; Brendan Eich is trying this with Brave, but Facebook's install base and ability to focus and deliver means they could probably pull this off better than everyone else. [1] https://www.slightfuture.com/blog/google-contributor-no-new-signups https://www.slightfuture.com/blog/google-contributor-no-new-...
ihsw 10y ago
It still doesn't change the fact that news orgs universally lack the time to conduct real journalism -- fake news is a direct result of reducing the time that journalists have to vet and verify content. Frankly I'm quite happy about "fake news" proliferating, it makes obvious how hopeless and useless news orgs are. They peddle claptrap and tripe with reckless abandon. Facebook could throw ten thousand engineers at the problem and 1) it wouldn't fix that nobody trusts Facebook 2) it wouldn't fix that nobody trusts news orgs. Fox News' "Fair and Balanced" slogan needs to taken as religious dogma -- everybody gets as voice and Facebook has no say in who can't speak. To any news tweeps reading: combating "fake news" by partnering with Facebook is a partisan attempt at self-fellatio -- all you do is get yourself off without accomplishing anything. Conduct real journalism with well-paid staff that have the time to do their job and anonymously share it with the public is the only way to restore trust, not 1) procuring access to high-value talking heads (eg: celebrities, pundits, "experts") that will regurgitate your propaganda or 2) shoving out unverified garbage (eg: 99% of reporting on Trump this past election cycle) at light-speed. #1 is just a sad attempt at remaining relevant while having someone authoritative make an empty appeal to viewers and #2 is plain laziness.
- samirillian 10y ago
  upvoted your comment, but obviate does not mean "to make obvious."
- maxfurman 10y ago
  Actually, lots of people trust what they read on Facebook. They shouldn't, but they do.
- JacobJans 10y ago
  > 1) it wouldn't fix that nobody trusts Facebook If only that were true. So many people do trust Facebook, and absolutely believe everything they read on it, including blatantly false "news."
- mcintyre1994 10y ago
  What do you mean by fake news? It seems to have started out as actual made up news by organisations/people/websites pretending to be news organisations, but actually just making things up - eg. The pope endorsing Trump story and I'm sure loads more on both sides. Then some professor published his list of fake news sites, and included a bunch of conservative media sites as well as satire as well as obvious fake news, there's probably some liberal legitimate media sites there too. Then after Trump won conservatives started saying every liberal media site had been peddling fake news when they reported polls etc had him way down and Hillary was winning. I've probably missed a load more things but my point is, I have no idea what fake news is at this point - but I do know that at least some of it isn't a result of a lack of time by legitimate journalists, some of it is just people making stuff up.
taytus 10y ago
From the first sentence: "Facebook is a new kind of platform" No, it's not. "we want to do our part to enable people to have meaningful conversations" No, you don't. I stopped reading after that. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
ABCLAW 10y ago
There's a continuing thread through these 'fake news' and 'new journalism' discussions, namely that there is a need for express interference in information circulation. This is premised upon the notion that there is a defect in circulation, but little discussion of the actual details of that circulation, its aims, and its qualities. The result is a discussion which has no direction, buffetted to and fro by the winds of self-interested parties. Is there any appetite to begin a multi-disciplinary conversation about what constitutes an effective conversation? I feel as if there's disconnect here, one that leaves us all poorer, if only intellectually, as a result.
nutate 10y ago
Just in time!
pp19dd 10y ago
Here's a big punchline buried in this release: crowdtangle is now free. That's $30k value (+/- number of seats) given away to struggling news organizations.
codr4life 10y ago
Oh come on, everyone and their mom knows Fakebook is the prime peddler of corporate and government bullshit; smearing more lip stick on that pig changes nothing.
stevehiehn 10y ago
I love this. I don't think FB is the stream of consciousness feed it once was. So why not embrace a new use case: A one stop news shop for both micro & macro news!
stevehiehn 10y ago
It would be amazing if FB was to try & use sentiment analysis to offer opposite stories for every issue. Maybe that would help people to see more sides to an issue.
beebeebush 10y ago
Huh Facebook starts journalism .. This can be dangerous.
aphextron 10y ago
I think this can only be positive. The status quo now is that real journalism is dying while clickbait nonsense makes makes money. If Facebook can work with traditional news agencies, whose strengths are their rigorous fact checking and journalistic integrity, to help them monetize more effectively then everyone wins.
llccbb 10y ago
>Local news is the starting place for great journalism. Not in my experience.

97 points by ents 10y ago

setra 10y ago

I'm sure this will be used for censoring political groups, and alternative media. As mainstream news sources become less popular / reputable they have really started pushing for methods to censor their opposition.

Qworg 10y ago
How do you draw the line between "alternative media" and "lies"?
- Vaskivo 10y ago
  You shouldn't censor lies. You should prove that they are lies. [EDIT] (just to add something to my post) If you delete/ommit/censor lies youd end up with: a) If every lie is removed, maybe everything that was removed is a lie. Which is not true. b) You end up with a "cry wolf situation", which may blow up hardly on facebook. You don't "cry wolf". You show that the wolf is there. Otherwise, the first time you screw up, you will lose all credibility.
  - komali2 10y ago
    But people don't believe proof that a lie is a lie - see the entire Trump phenomena. All he has to do is Tweet "fake news," and people won't believe any attempts to rationalize.
    - Vaskivo 10y ago
      Just because it doesn't work perfectly it doesn't mean we shouldn't do the right thing. To me, the ends don't justify the means.
  - matt4077 10y ago
    There's this old saying: "You can't prove a negative". It's wrong in that you often can indeed prove a negative, but the idea is still useful. Example: What would it take to conclusively proof that I never killed anybody vs. that I did? For the former, you'd basically need a continuous video feed from my birth. (b) "hardly" means something other than what you're thinking. No worries, many Russians make that mistake when speaking english.
- wfo 10y ago
  I could ask how you draw the line between "mainstream media" and "lies" just as easily and just as poignantly. The answer is easy in both cases. When they lie, it's a lie. When they don't, it's not.
  - oculusthrift 10y ago
    because "mainstream media" like nyt and wapo have well respected, educated journalists working around the clock to research stories and find evidence whereas "alternative media" is a guy in his moms basement making up stories. just as with science, people only dispute it when it goes against their own interests.
    - NoGravitas 10y ago
      That's quite an oversimplification. Your characterization of the alternative media is sometimes right (except that they're usually not making up stories -- they're usually summarizing stories produced by regular journalists, often with an editorial overlay). But there are also alternative media sources doing real research and investigative journalism, like Democracy Now! and the Intercept. On the other hand, the biggest, most respected of the mainstream publications, the NYT and the WaPo, have permanently tainted themselves by acting as stenographers for US government disinformation campaigns -- most notably in the run-up to the Iraq war, when they consistently promoted the fake WMD story.
      - threeseed 10y ago
        The Iraq War happened well over a decade ago. And the New York Times et al all did internal reviews of their behaviour and made substantive changes. From Morning Joe, this morning, you can already see that the New York Times has learnt lessons from that era: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaI0u0ZdpMg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaI0u0ZdpMg So the idea that they should still after all this time be permanently tainted is ridiculous and frankly is just an excuse by those who have different political persuasions.
        10y ago
- maxfurman 10y ago
  It's simple! If you want to believe it, it's "alternative media," and if you don't it's a filthy lie.
collias 10y ago
Exactly. Yesterday was a great example of mainstream sources losing credibility. They were all over the (as far as I know) totally unverified document that an intelligence agency decided to leak to Buzzfeed for some reason. They wonder why no one trusts them anymore...
- ConfuciusSay02 10y ago
  The fact that mainstream journalists are caught letting political operatives write their articles for them doesn't help their credibility either. Oh, and they're of course silent when it comes to reporting on their own corruption.
  - collias 10y ago
    It reminds me of that clip of CNN saying that we could only get the Wikileaks emails through their interpretation, and we shouldn't be reading them ourselves. ...turns out it was because they were implicated in them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DcATG9Qy_A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DcATG9Qy_A
    - gspetr 10y ago
      CNN is so corrupt it looks like a parody network. Their most egregious breach of ethics to date: On October 31, 2016, the New York Times reported: "CNN has severed ties with the Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, after hacked emails from WikiLeaks showed that she shared questions for CNN-sponsored candidate events in advance with friends on Hillary Clinton's campaign." CNN said it had accepted her formal resignation on October 14, adding: "We are completely uncomfortable with what we have learned about her interactions with the Clinton campaign while she was a CNN contributor."
      - threeseed 10y ago
        Donna Brazile shared questions with the candidates and CNN promptly terminated her position. What exactly did CNN do wrong here ? By your definition every company that has a employee who makes an egregious mistake is corrupt.
lordCarbonFiber 10y ago
To borrow the sentiment from Tim Minchin: if alternate news media was news it would just be called news.
resfirestar 10y ago
Why are you lot so reflexively opposed to anything related to journalism, even when explicitly aimed to help alternative media? It certainly doesn't make it look like you just want people to get news from more sources.
- gspetr 10y ago
  How is Facebook, known to be biased[1] is going to "help alternative media"? This looks like a power play to regain smeared credibility under the guise of "people's platform". [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/05/09/former-facebook-staff-say-conservative-news-was-buried-raising-questions-about-its-political-influence/?utm_term=.bc318f964d4d https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/05/09/fo...
- mattlevan 10y ago
  People, and hackers especially, generally don't "trust" Facebook to provide them with a platform to publish anymore. And why would they? Facebook will never open source the software responsible for determining what, when, and how people see news articles.
sergiotapia 10y ago
"Fake News" put some egg on their face and they're scrambling to find a way to censor alternative news.

randomgyatwork 10y ago

I get it, fake news is a problem because a new product is coming to solve the 'problem' of fake news.

IIIIIIII 10y ago
I wonder if the product will be a revamp of the old Facebook paper/reader-app ("all your contents are belong to us") honestly though I don't think FB/Zuck is quite so cynical yet

maxfurman 10y ago

This will not work, because the problem is not a lack of "news literacy," the problem is confirmation bias.

resfirestar 10y ago

I'm interested to see where the local news initiative goes. Big outlets have plenty of room to innovate with or without Facebook's help, but newspapers outside of state capitals seem to be in a difficult position of falling subscriptions and no way to replace that revenue online.

patja 10y ago
I am curious about your conclusion that some newspapers in state capitals are doing OK with subscriptions. Can you say more about which specific state capitals and newspapers you see as thriving? What do you see as different that is making newspapers in state capitals succeed where those in other cities are struggling?
- maxfurman 10y ago
  Not the parent, but I think it just means some cities are big enough markets to support a locally-focused newspaper but most smaller cities and towns aren't. It's no secret that local papers are dying but for example the Philadelphia Inquirer is still around.
  - resfirestar 10y ago
    Exactly. Yes, the big papers are less profitable than before, but however much the LA Times complains about adblock they're not going out of business. My hometown paper, on the other hand, is having trouble affording to have the full staff of journalists they used to maintain, and hiring someone to modernize their online presence may be out of reach.
the_watcher 10y ago
The local news piece was by far the most interesting to me as well. Until recently, nearly all journalists got their starts in local news, and as Facebook correctly notes, it has the advantage of focusing on stories that actually impact the intended audience's day to day life. Also, since the readers are often closer to the actual events, players, and issues described, it's arguable that the readers are less susceptible to the opinion disguised as reporting that typifies much of partisan, new media (although I'll admit that this is arguable at best, and assumes that the readers actually want their reporting to be factual).

mattlevan 10y ago

Is there anything Zuckerberg doesn't want to get his company involved with? It's been said on HN again and again, but I'm really looking forward to a decentralized digital publishing platform that gains momentum and actually gives Facebook a run for its money. Anyone know of any such existing platforms up and running now? Last I looked into this, I discovered "Steemit", but it doesn't seem very promising.

sogen 10y ago
Old stuff I remember that used to live on the internets: mIRC, BBS, Usenet groups, Online Chat, Forums
- mattlevan 10y ago
  Oh, yea. How could I forget? I still use IRC on a daily basis... I don't think of it as a place to read news, though.
  - Pigo 10y ago
    I get back on once in awhile just to see if people are going back. I'm wondering if any network is growing besides Freenet. Freenet is cool, and I get on for work once in awhile. But I really miss when Undernet and Dalnet where massive, with all sorts of stuff happening. Maybe I'm just out of touch with what the active networks are.
    - sogen 10y ago
      Maybe that's the future, going back eventually to alternative places where the user can have a separate identity and speak their opinions (I.e. Redddit)
pavel_lishin 10y ago
I mean, there's always RSS, but that's always had the issue of adoption. Is Steemit just a Reddit clone with the blockchain buzzword sprinkled on?

jawns 10y ago

This is sort of like Amazon announcing that it wants to strengthen its partnership with mom-and-pop shops, and help those mom-and-pop shops sell products in new and innovative ways. I'm a former journalist who used to work for a metro daily newspaper that has long suffered, as most newspapers have, from declining ad revenue. For these papers, the only reason to partner with Facebook is because they feel they have little choice. They would much rather have a healthy revenue stream and be self-sufficient. But so far, the news industry has not found anything that adequately replaces the print-ad-driven business model that served it so well for so long. So they're willing to try just about anything -- including, apparently, accepting a dinner invitation from a reputed cannibal.

cshenoy 10y ago
Interesting. Who is the reputed cannibal or was that said in jest?
- nerdponx 10y ago
  Facebook is the cannibal in this case I think.
- trequartista 10y ago
  Facebook is the cannibal because it's eating the businesses of these newspapers
- spdustin 10y ago
  It's used as a simile to anthropomorphize Facebook - FaceBook is like the cannibal that invites you, the business he's eating, over for dinner.
save_ferris 10y ago
This. I'm a back end dev at a small non-profit news org and it blows my mind how fast my employer wants us to integrate with FB instant articles and AMP without considering the consequences (AMP traffic staying in Google's network, etc.) Coming from a startup where our data was proprietary and execution meant everything, it feels weird sometimes that I get paid to make it as easy as possible for Google, FB, and others to access our content at scale (for free) while the news organization bears the infrastructure and engineering costs to do so. These big companies aren't in this to help media companies, they've successfully commoditized content production and demanded news organizations to get with their program or get buried and forgotten.

tucif 10y ago

I read this as if Facebook is posing itself to become kind of a "Journalism PaaS". That'd be an interesting shift.

Ghostium 10y ago

Introducing: The Facebook Censoring Project

threeseed 10y ago
Fine line between censorship and moderation.
- ljk 10y ago
  pretty clear line: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/22/technology/facebook-censorship-tool-china.html?_r=0 https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/22/technology/facebook-censo... http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-38073949 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-38073949 http://www.forbes.com/sites/xiangwang/2016/11/24/doing-business-the-chinese-way-facebook-develops-a-censorship-tool/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/xiangwang/2016/11/24/doing-busin... list goes on

6stringmerc 10y ago

Notably absent: Any mention of compensating the "participants" that Facebook is, I'd wager, pitching behind-the-scenes as a gigantic pool of free talent / labor ripe for monetization both as advertising targets and content generators! Disclosure: I'm on Medium and don't get paid diddly for my writings on there, nor spend much of any time investing in the Facebook ecosystem because it reminds me too much of AOL.

imh 10y ago
I'd imagine that in a pay-per-whatever, traditional news orgs aren't going to beat clickbait trash orgs. They talked about trying to help the news orgs subscription funnel, which seems a better solution.

niftich 10y ago

Facebook wants to solidify being a content portal for news. Its competition is Google with AMP, Google and other search engines without AMP, and first-party content producers, and 'orthodox news aggregators'. Both Facebook and Google have an advantage: they have hyperlocal info and tons of data on users collected through their tracking and ad networks, they are two of the most-visited websites and most-used apps in the world; meanwhile they subsume all the advantages of an old-style news aggregator by having a wide variety of third-party content they never had to pay for. 'Emerging business models': Facebook is a large IdP containing identities that they monetize through data mining with the goal of display ads. But this IdP allows their users to log in to other sites and engage in microtransaction-like behavior. Aside from making actual payments to FB, users could trade off 'ad credits' or whatnot. Flattr, Webpass are in this space; Google tried this with Contributor [1], which is about to see a revamp; Brendan Eich is trying this with Brave, but Facebook's install base and ability to focus and deliver means they could probably pull this off better than everyone else. [1] https://www.slightfuture.com/blog/google-contributor-no-new-signups https://www.slightfuture.com/blog/google-contributor-no-new-...

ihsw 10y ago

It still doesn't change the fact that news orgs universally lack the time to conduct real journalism -- fake news is a direct result of reducing the time that journalists have to vet and verify content. Frankly I'm quite happy about "fake news" proliferating, it makes obvious how hopeless and useless news orgs are. They peddle claptrap and tripe with reckless abandon. Facebook could throw ten thousand engineers at the problem and 1) it wouldn't fix that nobody trusts Facebook 2) it wouldn't fix that nobody trusts news orgs. Fox News' "Fair and Balanced" slogan needs to taken as religious dogma -- everybody gets as voice and Facebook has no say in who can't speak. To any news tweeps reading: combating "fake news" by partnering with Facebook is a partisan attempt at self-fellatio -- all you do is get yourself off without accomplishing anything. Conduct real journalism with well-paid staff that have the time to do their job and anonymously share it with the public is the only way to restore trust, not 1) procuring access to high-value talking heads (eg: celebrities, pundits, "experts") that will regurgitate your propaganda or 2) shoving out unverified garbage (eg: 99% of reporting on Trump this past election cycle) at light-speed. #1 is just a sad attempt at remaining relevant while having someone authoritative make an empty appeal to viewers and #2 is plain laziness.

samirillian 10y ago
upvoted your comment, but obviate does not mean "to make obvious."
maxfurman 10y ago
Actually, lots of people trust what they read on Facebook. They shouldn't, but they do.
JacobJans 10y ago
> 1) it wouldn't fix that nobody trusts Facebook If only that were true. So many people do trust Facebook, and absolutely believe everything they read on it, including blatantly false "news."
mcintyre1994 10y ago
What do you mean by fake news? It seems to have started out as actual made up news by organisations/people/websites pretending to be news organisations, but actually just making things up - eg. The pope endorsing Trump story and I'm sure loads more on both sides. Then some professor published his list of fake news sites, and included a bunch of conservative media sites as well as satire as well as obvious fake news, there's probably some liberal legitimate media sites there too. Then after Trump won conservatives started saying every liberal media site had been peddling fake news when they reported polls etc had him way down and Hillary was winning. I've probably missed a load more things but my point is, I have no idea what fake news is at this point - but I do know that at least some of it isn't a result of a lack of time by legitimate journalists, some of it is just people making stuff up.

taytus 10y ago

From the first sentence: "Facebook is a new kind of platform" No, it's not. "we want to do our part to enable people to have meaningful conversations" No, you don't. I stopped reading after that. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

ABCLAW 10y ago

There's a continuing thread through these 'fake news' and 'new journalism' discussions, namely that there is a need for express interference in information circulation. This is premised upon the notion that there is a defect in circulation, but little discussion of the actual details of that circulation, its aims, and its qualities. The result is a discussion which has no direction, buffetted to and fro by the winds of self-interested parties. Is there any appetite to begin a multi-disciplinary conversation about what constitutes an effective conversation? I feel as if there's disconnect here, one that leaves us all poorer, if only intellectually, as a result.

nutate 10y ago

Just in time!

pp19dd 10y ago

Here's a big punchline buried in this release: crowdtangle is now free. That's $30k value (+/- number of seats) given away to struggling news organizations.

codr4life 10y ago

Oh come on, everyone and their mom knows Fakebook is the prime peddler of corporate and government bullshit; smearing more lip stick on that pig changes nothing.

stevehiehn 10y ago

I love this. I don't think FB is the stream of consciousness feed it once was. So why not embrace a new use case: A one stop news shop for both micro & macro news!

stevehiehn 10y ago

It would be amazing if FB was to try & use sentiment analysis to offer opposite stories for every issue. Maybe that would help people to see more sides to an issue.

beebeebush 10y ago

Huh Facebook starts journalism .. This can be dangerous.

aphextron 10y ago

I think this can only be positive. The status quo now is that real journalism is dying while clickbait nonsense makes makes money. If Facebook can work with traditional news agencies, whose strengths are their rigorous fact checking and journalistic integrity, to help them monetize more effectively then everyone wins.

llccbb 10y ago

>Local news is the starting place for great journalism. Not in my experience.