At some point over the past decade, Facebook stopped being a mostly harmless social network filled with baby photos and became one of the most powerful forces in media—with more than 2 billion users every month and a growing lock on the ad revenue that used to underpin most of the media industry. When it comes to threats to journalism, in other words, Facebook qualifies as one, whether it wants to admit it or not.
Facebook’s relationship with the media has been a classic Faustian bargain: News outlets want to reach those 2 billion users, so they put as much of their content as they can on the network. Some of them are favored by the company’s all-powerful (and completely mysterious) algorithm, giving them access to a wider audience to pitch for subscriptions or the pennies worth of ad revenue they receive from the platform.
“Facebook is a threat not necessarily because it’s evil but because it does what it does very well, which is to target people for advertisers,” says Martin Nisenholtz, former head of digital strategy at The New York Times. Martin Nisenholtz is wrong, Facebook is a threat BECAUSE it has concentrated so much power into the hands of a select few by using the personal information of it’s users to generate not only cash, but also to modify, and in many cases, drive behavior.
It’s about control. Not only the control over what advertisements will be presented to users or the number of impressions that they are bombarded with; it is about nudging, pushing, directing and ultimately controlling the “choices” made. Choices of everything from breakfast cereals to soap flakes to elected officials.
Newspeak is no longer an omniscient tele-screen spewing forth obvious propaganda from “Big Brother” admonishing that you are being watched. Today, it is the blue glow of a cellphone screen, or a tablet or an “X-Box” or a laptop directing your buying behavior and your child-rearing decisions and your “vote” for “leaders”.
1984 is no longer just a work of fiction warning of the possibilities of a dystopian future. George Orwell’s book has become a “how-to” manual where we have willingly allowed our history, our freedoms and our very lives to be chucked down the “memory hole”.
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