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Have you heard of the Sinclair group? > The company is the largest television station operator in the United States by number of stations, and largest by total
by bduerst 8y ago
Have you heard of the Sinclair group?
> The company is the largest television station operator in the United States by number of stations, and largest by total coverage; owning or operating a total of 193 stations across the country in over 100 markets (covering 40% of American households)...
> Sinclair's stations have been known for featuring news content and programming that promote conservative political positions, and have been involved in various controversies surrounding politically-motivated programming decisions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Broadcast_Group#Political_views https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Broadcast_Group#Polit...
- drhayes9 8y agoI have, but I think Facebook, as a media company, is what Sinclair can only wish it was. It's a media company that has real-time measurements of what people are engaging with, who they are demographically, and can respond minute-by-minute with adjustments of what kind of "coverage" they provide (for Facebook, this is adjustments to the algorithms that make stories show up in users' timelines). I think we, as users, bear a lot of responsibility for the content we create and if there's a lot of awful stuff out there... well, we created it. But I think someone deciding to make a bunch of money in concentrating and distributing that awfulness deserves a lot of scrutiny.
- bduerst 8y agoNot quite. I think for it to be a more apt comparison, Facebook would need to be pushing a narrative to it's most popular users to promote on their channels, the same way that Sinclair group does: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWLjYJ4BzvI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWLjYJ4BzvI I don't think there's evidence of that right now with Facebook.