The increasingly dangerous power Facebook has over news organizations

As I began working on this blog post, the oddest thing happened: Each mention of the New York Times or The Washington Post in the piece cited below by Columbia Journalism Review showed up on the page as gobbledy-gook – a strange mix of capitalized and lower-case letters, some of which overlapped.

I have no idea what that was all about. When I went back to the CJR page a few minutes later, the mess was gone and each reference that was previously mangled simply referred to “the Times” or “The Washington Post.”

It’s enough to make a writer dependent on the Internet feel a bit paranoid.

In any event, CJR’s Trevor Timm has written a chilling piece about the enormous power Facebook, with its 1 billion-plus users, its tens of billions of dollars in cash, and its crew of high-powered Washington lobbyists, could soon have over the news media. We’re talking about censorship. And we’re talking about struggling news organizations of all sizes that could become dependent for survival on advertising deals with the social network giant.

Here is how Timm starts off his piece:

“Facebook has more power in determining who can speak and who can be heard around the globe than any Supreme Court justice, any king or any president.” Those prescient words came from law professor Jeffrey Rosen way back in 2010. Five years later, the Times is willingly handing its censorship keys over to that king of kings.
Much has been made of Facebook’s potential new partnership with the Times, Buzzfeed, and a handful of other news organizations, who may soon start posting stories directly on Facebook instead of having Facebook readers reach their content through a link. This move has the potential to make a lot of money for cash-strapped news organizations and produce another anchor into the news world for the cash-flush social network.

It also has the potential to rob news organizations of their soul. Felix Salmon believes this could kill the news brand (it could). Others, like Mathew Ingram, argue that it could give Facebook too much control over which news organizations thrive and which will die when the social media company decides to tweak its algorithm (it does). But the problem is much broader than that.

What this discussion has missed is perhaps the most crucial element of Facebook’s new power: the right to (choose) between the free expression of ideas or to instead impose censorship when it deems content unworthy. That should worry the public, because when given that power in the past, Facebook has ruled with an iron fist.

The Times recently reported this, while downplaying their involvement:

In recent months, Facebook has been quietly holding talks with at least half a dozen media companies about hosting their content inside Facebook rather than making users tap a link to go to an external site.
Such a plan would represent a leap of faith for news organizations accustomed to keeping their readers within their own ecosystems, as well as accumulating valuable data on them. Facebook has been trying to allay their fears, according to several of the people briefed on the talks, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were bound by nondisclosure agreements.

So, what did the Times management have to say about all this? Nothing. The article, written and published by the Times on March 23, says they declined to comment.