India Today social media editor on why Facebook down ranking news is flawed at multiple levels
Facebook’s logic behind overhauling its algorithm to downgrade news in users’ feed is flawed at multiple levels. It is in contradiction with its own objective. In this case, if you peg Facebook’s complex algorithm against raw common sense, the latter will win hands down.
The primary objective behind the change is to prioritise posts from friends and family and start “meaningful conversations” around issues. (Read: to give more power to the user). The company says it will predict which posts will encourage you to interact with your friends and give these posts more weight — in terms of ranking — on your feed. The platform, therefore, decides for the users the content they may want to engage with.
What if my need, as a user, is more to be informed than to interact and engage?
The other pressing objective for Facebook's decision on the newsfeed is to contain fake news. We perfectly understand the intent. Mark Zuckerberg’s 2018 resolution is to “fix” the social network. It obviously stems from the fire that the platform has come under in the recent past for intense polarisation, distribution of fake news, et al. Since posts from friends will be weighted most heavily, this update means that moving forward, people are likely to see less content from publishers and celebrities in their news feed.
What Zuckerberg does not seem to have taken into account is the fact that the way Facebook algorithm works right now, the virality of a piece of content is treated as its credibility. If a piece of news is being shared and engaged with the most, it seems to develop a credibility (and leg) of its own and gets wider distribution irrespective of its source. It is mostly friends and family who share and propagate false and unverified chunks of news and information (mostly from garage brands and not from authentic media houses), making them go viral.
So by narrowing the pipe for authentic and verified news in the ecosystem, you are actually doing both your users and the news ecosystem a disfavour.
Let us evaluate the matrix that Facebook actually wants to pursue as a signal of success in making this change – interactions. These interactions on a post can be shares, comments, messages, reactions, or likes on content. This argument is flawed at multiple levels, especially in the India context. In India, the “meaningful engagement” that Facebook hopes to drive is mostly clouded by people pushing and subscribing to a convenient view (not necessarily based on facts and the truth). One look at the comments below most posts and you will know that the engagement is farthest from being meaningful. It is basic and, many a times, toxic.
Given that Facebook algorithm can read numbers but not sentiments, using that as a factor of deciding what is meaningful is a bit of a pipe-dream, at least for places like India. FB is usually good with understanding cultures. So it is surprising that it is painting everyone with a single brush when it comes to engagement behaviours.
Unfortunately, this will trigger another trend in the media industry, which already seems to be unveiling itself. Media companies are increasingly being egged towards branching out to create soft feature content (mostly through their sister brands) that can go viral and will drive engagement on Facebook. This has become inevitable to protect the investments already made into Facebook. But that is another story.
News will have to remain news and if conventional and reputed media houses bank less on news for revenues and are forced to put their resources where the money is, it is bad news all the way.
And think about this. In making this new turn, Facebook seems to be ignoring the reality of having become the default source of news for many, the world over. According to Pew Research Centre, 45 per cent of Americans are getting their news on Facebook. We could safely assume that a larger part of Facebook’s Indian subscribers also bank on it for news (especially in the vernacular space, which is also typical to India). This should be good news for FB and is a testament to their success.
While the US fans could still have an option to keep getting their preferred content served to them through the option under the News Feed tab (this option allows them to prioritise pages and may be a beta), there is no such option available to the Indian users yet.
Given all these observations and more, it is difficult to comprehend the logic behind Facebook’s new move, more so in the Indian context.
The company is known to innovate, roll out changes and then fix things, thanks to their being open to feedback. With so many people depending so much on the social networking platform, maybe they need to think twice about making changes so often and so soon.