Facebook Has All the Power - Julie Posetti - The Atlantic - 0 views
www.theatlantic.com/...374215
journalism facebook behaviorism legitimacy university news data power social media
shared by Javier E on 12 Jul 14
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scholars covet thy neighbor's data. They're attracted to the very large and often fascinating data sets that private companies have developed.
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It's the companies that own and manage this data. The only standards we know they have to follow are in the terms-of-service that users accept to create an account, and the law as it stands in different countries.
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the "sexiness" of the Facebook data that led Cornell University and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) into an ethically dubious arrangement, where, for example, Facebook's unreadable 9,000-word terms-of-service are said to be good enough to meet the standard for "informed consent."
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When the study drew attention and controversy, there was a moment when they both could have said: "We didn't look carefully enough at this the first time. Now we can see that it doesn't meet our standards." Instead they allowed Facebook and the PR people to take the lead in responding to the controversy.
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What should this reality signal to Facebook users? Is it time to pull-back? You have (almost) no rights. You have (almost) no control. You have no idea what they're doing to you or with you. You don't even know who's getting the stuff you are posting, and you're not allowed to know. Trade secret!
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Are there any particular warnings here for journalists and editors in terms of their exposure on Facebook? Yeah. Facebook has all the power. You have almost none. Just keep that in mind in all your dealings with it, as an individual with family and friends, as a journalist with a story to file, and as a news organization that is "on" Facebook.
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I am not in a commercial situation where I have to maximize my traffic, so I can opt out. Right now my choice is to keep my account, but use it cynically.
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does this level of experimentation indicate the prospect of a further undermining of audience-driven news priorities and traditional news values? The right way to think about it is a loss of power—for news producers and their priorities. As I said, Facebook thinks it knows better than I do what "my" 180,000 subscribers should get from me.
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Facebook has "where else are they going to go?" logic now. And they have good reason for this confidence. (It's called network effects.) But "where else are they going to go?" is a long way from trust and loyalty. It is less a durable business model than a statement of power.
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I distinguished between the "thin" legitimacy that Facebook operates under and the "thick" legitimacy that the university requires to be the institution it was always supposed to be. (Both are distinct from il-legitimacy.) News organizations should learn to make this distinction more often. Normal PR exists to muddle it. Which is why you don't hand a research crisis over to university PR people.
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some commentators have questioned the practice of A/B headline testing in the aftermath of this scandal—is there a clear connection? The connection to me is that both are forms of behaviourism. Behaviourism is a view of human beings in which, as Hannah Arendt said, they are reduced to the level of a conditioned and "behaving" animal—an animal that responds to these stimuli but not those. This is why a popular shorthand for Facebook's study was that users were being treated as lab rats.
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Journalism is supposed to be about informing people so they can understand the world and take action when necessary. Action and behaviour are not the same thing at all. One is a conscious choice, the other a human tendency. There's a tension, then, between commercial behaviourism, which may be deeply functional in some ways for the news industry, and informing people as citizens capable of understanding their world well enough to improve it, which is the deepest purpose of journalism. A/B testing merely highlights this tension.