Negative Space
“Starting today,” Mark Zuckerberg announced on January 29, “[Facebook is] going to show more stories from news sources in your local town or city.”
The move toward more local outlets comes as the company faces criticism about its role in censorship, cooperation with police and the problem of “fake news” stories going viral on and being promoted by its own website. The “local news” bandwagon is popular and Zuckerberg knows it. (According to a new Gallup and Knight Foundation poll, local newspapers are nation’s most trusted news outlets.)
“People consistently tell us they want to see more local news on Facebook,” Zuckerberg wrote in the January 29 statement.
The election of President Donald Trump has brought new attention on how citizens gather news and information. Faith in the media industry is abysmal and more people are questioning the modern social media paradigm.
Facebook’s pivot toward local media may be masking the company’s more controversial efforts to phase out “divisive issues.”
People who felt totally blindsided by Trump’s election have begun to see and question blind spots created by personal social media silos. In his January Netflix interview with David Letterman, President Barack Obama also warned about relying on algorithms for news.
“If you are getting all your information off algorithms being sent through a phone, and it is just reinforcing whatever biases you have . . . at a certain point you just live in a bubble,” Obama said.
The very architecture of social media—where intelligent algorithms try to predict what we will “like”—is being drawn into question. And rightfully so!
More people are starting to see how our collective attention has been centralized, and are eager to diversify how information is gathered and spread. The repeal of net neutrality—the rule that all Internet users are treated equally—only heightens this urgency. This has increased interest in local, trusted news sources.
But Facebook’s pivot toward local media may be masking the company’s more controversial efforts to phase out “divisive issues.”
For example, recent changes in Facebook and Google algorithms have reduced traffic to left-leaning publications like Truthout and AlterNet. Meanwhile, many of the local outlets Facebook aims to amplify have been consolidated by mega media conglomerates with their own agendas. And the Federal Communications Commission has changed its rules to allow the far-right local TV network Sinclair Broadcast Group to expand its reach to three-quarters of U.S. households. But Zuckerberg glosses over these complications in his January statement.
“Many people told me they thought that if [Facebook] could turn down the temperature on the more divisive issues and instead focus on concrete local issues, then we’d all make more progress together,” he wrote.
Any attempt by Facebook or Google to uplift local news must be greeted with a healthy dose of skepticism.
These aren’t the only forces threatening the integrity of local news. Currently, state mandates often require that important pieces of government information, like legal notices, bids for government contracts, road closures, new permits, and other public notices be advertised in local newspapers—providing some government transparency and important, reliable revenues for local papers. But proposed legislation in states including New Jersey, Mississippi, Missouri, and Pennsylvania would reduce revenue for local papers by softening or removing such mandates.
It’s not just Facebook that has developed a newfound appreciation of local news. Zuckerberg’s announcement corresponds with the launch of a separate “Report for America” project, backed by Google, that will “[deploy] outstanding emerging journalists into [local] newsrooms around the country.” Think the problematic Teach for America model, but for journalism. Yet Report for America boasts support from such heavy philanthropic and journalistic hitters as the Knight Foundation, Galloway Family Foundation, and the Center for Investigative Reporting and Reveal Labs.
There are admirable efforts to shrink “news deserts”—places where there is no local media coverage. In 2017, investigative outlet ProPublica launched a funding stream for local newsrooms and the Democracy Fund introduced a “Local News Lab” to also funnel much-needed money to local investigative teams.
Support for local outlets should of course be applauded. But any attempt by Facebook or Google to uplift local news must be greeted with a healthy dose of skepticism. After all, it is these companies’ mammoth online advertising regime that bled local papers of critical ad revenue and contributed to the news crisis that we now face.
Simon Davis-Cohen is editor of the Ear to the Ground newsletter, a “civic intelligence” service that mines local newspapers from across the USA, state legislatures, grassroots press releases and corporate blogs.