What Facebook does if it doesn't want you to read a post
Over the past two to three years, there has been increased focus on how Facebook's growing presence is shaping the world around us. From United States to India, the allegation that the platform is being used to spread fake and sponsored news to tilt the balance in favour of certain politicians in crucial elections is living proof of the power that Facebook enjoys in the digital age.
With more than two billion active monthly users across the globe, Facebook is arguably the biggest portal for the dissemination of breaking news – and notoriously becoming the prime source of creating panic during the times of natural calamities or terror attacks. As a result, several social media watchers and activists have urged it to take responsibility and find a fix to this growing menace.
So what does Facebook do when faced with such fierce criticism for the spread of false – and potentially dangerous – news and calls for taking more responsibility for the power it wields? Nothing good it seems.
Facebook's response
In response, Facebook has gone ahead and tested a new feature in six countries that removes all media that it classifies as professional in nature from the main news feed of the social media platform.
The experiment, which began on October 19 and continues in Sri Lanka, Guatemala, Bolivia, Cambodia, Serbia and Slovakia, has seen Facebook limiting its news feed to only show personal posts from friends and paid adverts while posts from followed pages – including the big media houses – have been relegated to an expanded section called Explore Feed.
This move looks like an attempt at curbing the spread of fake news and information on the platform, but that's far from the truth. But we'll get to the later. For now, let's take a look at its immediate affects.
Move hitting media organisations
For now, media organisations in the six countries containing a fraction of the world’s population have had one of their most important publishing platforms removed overnight. Speaking to The Guardian, Dina Fernandez, a journalist and member of the editorial board at Guatemalan news site Soy502, explained how the move has wreaked havoc for her media house.
"The Facebook explore tab killed 66 per cent of our traffic. Just destroyed it… years of really hard work were just swept away... It has been catastrophic, and I am very, very worried.”
A similar story emerged when data from Slovakia was looked at. Facebook-owned analytics site CrowdTangle shows that user interaction in the country fell by 60 per cent overnight for the Facebook pages of a broad selection of the country’s media Facebook pages.
Bloggers, small organisations worst hit
The worst hit by the move, however, have been smaller organisations and bloggers who cannot afford to pay for shared posts and will eventually have to stop relying on Facebook as a medium for sharing their work.
Filip Struhárik, a Slovakian journalist with news site Denník N says Facebook's latest move can become a problem for smaller publishers who can’t afford to pay for distribution on the networking platform by boosting posts.
Why Facebook's move does more harm than good
Over the years, Facebook has grown into the preferred platform for citizens’ initiatives and small NGOs looking to connect with the masses because of its reach. For ones who don't have the infrastructure to engage with people in other ways, Facebook has grown to become a platform which they can use to raise awareness about important societal issues.
For example, Cambodian video blogger Catherine Harry, whose Facebook page A Dose of Cath features first-person videos by her on taboo topics like virginity and menstruation that rarely get airtime on TV, has been hit extremely hard by the move.
Speaking to the BBC, Cathrine explained that after the rolling out of the new feature, just 2,000 of her fans saw her video in the first hour, compared to about 12,000 who normally watch her videos within the first hour.
In countries like Cambodia where journalists, civil society groups and activists already face an uphill battle just to be heard, Facebook's move will not only sound the death knell for their crusades but also strengthen authoritarian and corrupt politicians.
Sweeping the problem under the rug?
As is clear, this move, at best, can only be described as an attempt by Facebook to sweep under the rug the problem of spreading of fake news through its platform, while, at its worst, it is an attempt at making money off a dangerous phenomenon.
By sending non-paid content to a less accessible section on the platform and effectively cutting easy access to important news articles and even viral videos in one go, Facebook is essentially attempting to literally monetise the problems that already plague its platform.
Instead of doing more to improve its fact-checking initiatives to fight the spread of false information, relegating all unpaid news to a less easily accessible section of the website only goes to show Facebook is not serious about taking responsibility for the immense power it holds in this new age of social media.
For now, this remains an experiment, but if Mark Zuckerberg and co decide to roll this feature out across the globe, the decision would come at a great cost. In doing so, Facebook will not only be washing its hands off its responsibility but also be severely denting the fourth pillar of democracy, the cost of which the company should understand before going ahead with the move.