The previous poster does have a point though. A lot of the 'news' people see on Facebook and the like are simply shared from other news outlets on facebook. Facebook doesn't produce the news but it disseminates it.
Because of this some countries even wanted to impose a facebook tax. Like Australia.
That is /so/ much nonsense. Doesn't matter how you editorialize by controlling what people see including with a trained algorithm optimized for "engagement" that tends to be pretty similar to "outrage." The second you "promote" a wider engagement on any article or topic at the expense of another you aren't pure or anything like it. And we'd be heroically naive if we really were willing to bet our own lives on someone not "tweaking" the algo for their own beliefs along the chain somewhere. I know I would if I saw too many pro-nazi content promoted, for example and that is editorial with nothing at all "pure" about it.
FB has never, ever been a "purely a platform" other than in their own PR releases. Censoring because politicians tell them to do it is a wholly different issue on top of that.
It's always been like that, from the very beginning. They never just let true laissez-faire with the news on the site, like they pretended to sometimes and it looked like a story "went viral" like out of control. The only time I remember a story really getting out of the control of the editor, was on reddit in the thread about tips waiters received from a certain race. Just hit a nerve like what the fuck, like they found out the conspiracy behind Santa Claus, the existence of stereotypes doesn't guarantee that reality is to the exact contrary. Patterns emerged with no machine learning, just thousands of screams into the void, which wasn't quite that empty a void. Those waiters weren't alone, and this was back when reddit was less bot-infested, it always has been and it always hasn't been, but back then it was harder to do a robotic painfully sincere tone. I do remember one argument against the current of that thread, one among hundreds, like Social Justice short circuit. If you tell someone it's just him with 9 bad experiences for every 1 good experience, just statistics, and for that to work of course you need them not to know more statistics like statistical estimates for the probability the statistics report can be proven to be a lie with very little data, you must never let them talk to anyone about their uniquely unlucky misfortune. You can make people really stupid by teaching them bad statistics but in groups it doesn't work. So on that note, Facebook and all the others have to keep an eye out and always moderate. And you know? I did that myself once, there was a site connecting travelers to people who wanted stuff from abroad, like a marketplace, and nobody moderated it for a while, I finally go and it's disgusting, all scammers, buyers and sellers everybody is a scammer, like I needed to blacklist the user database and start from nothing. So if I had done some regex to look for blatant stuff, I might have been able to salvage more of it.
I suppose the unmoderated self-image Facebook (and everyone else) tries to project, beyond being about reducing wage moneys by getting "users" to "generate" "content", is that it looks fresher, more meritocratic, anything could rise to the top, nowadays the obsession with virality is much less than six years ago but everyone buys into the fifteen minutes of fame thing.
- The news is informed by the content on the platforms
The platforms control the information and they control what people see as the "news".