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Facebook is quickly becoming the de facto Great Firewall of the world. Of course there will be conflict with world-scale ideologues like Soros. Of course ther
by resters 8y ago
Facebook is quickly becoming the de facto Great Firewall of the world.
Of course there will be conflict with world-scale ideologues like Soros.
Of course there will be an elaborate dance between Facebook and US politicians who want to control more and more aspects of the firewall.
In case it’s not clear, facebook’s news feed algorithm is a content filter and in many ways it performs (or can be adapted to perform) much the same function as China’s Great Firewall, which is suppression of dissent and certain political ideas.
But compared to China’s Firewall, Facebook has orders of magnitude more power because it has significantly more metadata about each person.
- buboard 8y agoi dont think the hyperbole helps in anything. there are other avenues, and nobody can force me to use facebook.
- resters 8y agoThat’s a correct but ultimately naive perspective. So many of the other systems (such as news publishing) are closely intertwined with Facebook and strive to publish content that will be maximally boosted by the algorithm.
- buboard 8y agoyou 're grossly overstating the amount of traffic that facebook brings to news sites. It's about 10%.
- resters 8y agoGoogled it and saw 35% at the peak declining by 25% which would be around 26%. But that is not the important metric. When an article goes viral the traffic is essentially free.
- buboard 8y agothat would be 35% of referral traffic, which is approximately 50% of total traffic? https://www.recode.net/2018/2/15/17013618/google-facebook-traffic-publishers-amp-chartbeat https://www.recode.net/2018/2/15/17013618/google-facebook-tr... the stats differ depending on the source, but there is clearly a huge drop for facebook past years.
- resters 8y agoTrue the exact numbers are hard to pin down. My point is that articles gaining traction on social media is viewed as a major dimension of editorial strategy (as is obvious by the dramatic increase in clickbait headlines), because once a story goes viral it is all upside for the paper's own views and ad sales. This was either already incentivized by the internal incentives given to editors and writers, or incentives have been adapted (by papers that have survived) to take this valuable channel into strong consideration when deciding how to phrase something.