FIrst to note is that Facebook has now backed down on the "napalm girl" photo: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/09/facebook-reinstates-napalm-girl-photo
On Fri, Sep 9, 2016 at 6:36 PM, Kevin M. <drunkbastar...@gmail.com> wrote: > Much like the late Gawker, Facebook's goal is to draw the masses to the > website. The goal is not to provide or distribute information, merely to > share (and get users to share) content to keep people interested. Just because a website doesn't consider itself part of the news-media, for better or for worse, it *is* a dissipater of news. They've actively done deals with news providers to get outlets to use Facebook, most recently encouraging the uptake of Facebook Instant Articles (those little lightning logos which mean that FB serves the story rather than, say, the NYT). 62% of Americans say they get news from social media with 66% of FB users saying they do ( http://www.journalism.org/2016/05/26/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2016/ ). Zuckerberg may not have set out to build a news resource, but one way or another he has one. (There's a lot wrong with the way news is presented and surfaced in FB, but that's for another day.) And they're disrupting even the digital advertising plans of other news outlets, that had already been disrupted by the internet in first place. A number of news providers that had been seeing increase digital advertising revenues have now seen them flatten out, while that revenue has gone to FB, built upon those shared links that FB uses to keep you on its platform. It's hoovering up digital cash. Look, I'm not here to defend commercial news organisations that are seeing their business models obliterated by digital newcomers. They exist in a capitalist system. But those digital newcomers can't just ignore all responsibility. FB was completely wrong to just get rid of its editorial team, and as PGage said, should have either trained them or hired new independent editors. It's not like there's a shortage of journalists looking for jobs! And it's not as though FB can't afford that kind of thing. FB also needs to take its editorial responsibilities more seriously. They might have a blanket ban on nipples appearing on the site, but there will always be "edge" cases including mothers breastfeeding, or one of the most famous and important news photos in the history of visual media. > > Also worth noting that, unlike Twitter, Facebook doesn't label paid posts > as ads in its trending topics (they did start referring to posts as > "sponsored" in the news feeds, finally). So there is no way of knowing > which topics are trending due to popularity vs those somebody paid to make > trending. > Perhaps FB does it differently in the UK and Europe, but perhaps not. Either way, such action would be illegal over here, and anything that's advertising, including on FB, Twitter or wherever, should be labelled as such. Plenty of celebrities posting paid Tweets fall foul of this incidentally. Adam -- -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to tvornottv@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to tvornottv-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to tvornottv+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
