Facebook seeks to become "the fifth estate"

BarcelonaMark Zuckerberg is playing Catan on his private jet with some Facebook executives and he's losing. Donald Trump won the election for the first time just a few days ago, and as he moves the pieces on the board, he looks annoyed. The reason is that his vice president of public policy, Elliot Schrage, pushed him to publish a statement claiming that fake news on the social network he created is a tiny fraction and didn't influence the election results. The mere act of making that connection seems to him a major capitulation to the press, and he attributes it to resentment because his platform is draining the lifeblood of the industry—advertising. Several thousand meters in the air, they discuss the move, and Schrage suggests that perhaps the time has come to give the media a larger share of the profits: after all, Facebook relies heavily on the content produced by news outlets. Zuckerberg isn't convinced. His solution is very expeditious: to reinvent the American media.

Sarah Wynn-Williams, another passenger on that flight, will include the Facebook president's words in the book The irresponsible ones (Peninsula), which evokes the scene: "Why are you advising me to make concessions to traditional media? It's a dying sector. We shouldn't adapt. You're making concessions to a dying sector instead of dominating it. Instead of crushing it." It presents the option of buying the New York Times and reshape it in Facebook's image, or go even further: "Instead of buying a newspaper, we can do it. From scratch. With internal barriers to safeguard its independence, or we can simply not put them in place. I would appoint a CEO of Facebook, but to do something new. Not the fourth estate, but the fifth. But a fifth estate with Facebook at its center."

Nine years later, that episode illuminates the path the platform has followed and Zuckerberg's vision of what the relationship should be between the social networks he controls—his company Meta also owns Instagram and WhatsApp—and the media. Schrage left the company in 2018, burned out and disillusioned. His departure coincides with the rise of Joel Kaplan, who before joining Facebook in 2014 had worked at the White House for George W. Bush as deputy chief of staff. Zuckerberg's rapprochement with Republicans, once Trump won again, became evident with the appointment of Kaplan as Meta's chief policy officer. One of the measures this executive has pushed through is the elimination of collaboration with media outlets that acted as professional and independent fact-checkers. Facebook is thus joining the self-regulation advocated by the X network, where users themselves decide by majority vote whether information is true or false. Several experts have pointed out the manipulable nature of these community notes and their biases toward far-right positions, which is the dominant force in this digital culture war. "They've used us to clean up their image," declared Brooke Binkowski, former editor-in-chief of Snopas, one of the publications that carried out this task. "They don't take themselves seriously. They're only interested in looking good and avoiding responsibility."

The secret value NEQ

There's a particularly telling moment in Facebook's history regarding its relationship with journalism. During the 2020 US elections, which Trump lost (without conceding defeat), an unprecedented wave of disinformation swept the nation. Google's engineers proposed a change to Zuckerberg: altering the NEQ value of the algorithm. NEQ stands for... news ecosystem quality And it's a secret number that Facebook assigns to media outlets, based on the quality of their reporting. During those days, it was decided that the news feed displayed on the platform would prioritize quality headlines over those publications known to contain [unclear - possibly "content" or "information"]. fake newsThe result was a feed much less tense and rational.

"It was a brief glimpse into what Facebook could be," one of the social network's members who participated in the experiment admitted anonymously. But, after five days, they returned to the original polarizing formula, which ensures more time spent online and, therefore, more revenue.

Despite its name as a social network, Facebook is actually a large advertising platform that offers users an experience in exchange for their data, which can be extremely precise: the book An ugly truth Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang's article explains some of the inner workings of Meta and how it can assign up to 50,000 different variables to a single user. Some are seemingly innocuous, such as age or a preference for a particular musical style. Others are more sinister, as when it was demonstrated that Instagram could detect if a teenage girl deleted a selfie shortly afterward and then target her with ads that exploited her insecurities about her appearance.

From an advertising perspective, this hyper-segmentation is what has allowed Zuckerberg to aspire to fulfill his dream of establishing himself as the fifth estate. The progression has been unequivocal, reaching a very significant milestone for Facebook in 2018: it marks the moment when its advertising revenue ($55 billion) surpassed that of all the newspapers in the United States combined, which at the time numbered 1,279. And the trends are unequivocal: the number of newspapers in the country has fallen to 938, while advertising revenue has tripled to €153.5 billion. It is in this context that Europe is trying to curb the exploitation of personal data without consent. In 2023, for example, the EU imposed two fines of €390 million and €1.2 billion: the first for implicitly forcing users to accept targeted ads and the second for the illegal transfer of European user data to the United States. This November, in Spain, a court ordered Meta to pay €542 million to media outlets for unfair competition by exploiting its users' personal data without legal basis.