There will come a time when the giant American hi-tech companies which dominate social networking and internet search will be clear that they are something beyond being simple businesses. Size and influence means some responsibility and accountability.
But I discovered over the past week that Facebook has yet even to acknowledge that this responsibility exists when it deals with news.
Andy Mitchell, Facebook’s director of news and global media partnerships, came to speak at the international journalism festival in Perugia. Each month, 1.4bn people use Facebook. In America, 30% of adults get their news via Facebook (27% in the UK); 88% of millennials in the US do so (71% in Italy). That makes Mitchell one of the most – if not the most – powerful news distributor on the planet.
And what Mitchell had to say was straightforward in most ways and extremely odd in one important omission.
Facebook wants to improve the “experience” (this word cropped up a lot) of people getting their news on mobile to improve. Links to clunky news sites load slowly and Facebook is talking to major sites (such as the New York Times and Buzzfeed) about embedding their journalism directly in Facebook. Every statistic underlines how much people like getting their news on Facebook.
This was all fascinating, but there wasn’t any mention of how Facebook sees and handles its role as a news gatekeeper, influencing both the detail and flow of what people see. The issue didn’t come up right till the end of Mitchell’s session when a Scandinavian questioner asked Mitchell about instances of Facebook cutting out material from the news linked from his organisation and an Italian student followed up.
