Facebook Says Publishers are Free to Drop Out of its Platform

Social network Facebook, which is facing unprecedented criticism over its role as a platform for disseminating fake news (and not doing enough about it), enabling Russian trolls in 2016 U.S. elections and posing mental health risk to passive users (which it says can be cured by using the site more and engaging in a thoughtful way), finally came out and said what media publishers may have wanted to hear all along. At Recode's Code Media conference in California today, Campbell Brown, the company's head of news partnerships, had this far less enthusiastic message to share:

"My job is not to go recruit people from news organisations to put their stuff on Facebook... My job is to make sure there is quality news on Facebook and that publishers who want to be on Facebook… have a business model that works. If anyone feels this isn’t the right platform for them, they should not be on Facebook."

Facebook, given its humongous 2 billion-plus user base, has been a platform simply too huge to ignore (and too big to regulate), and rightly so, most media organisations have relied on it to distribute content and attract new audiences, even if it meant adapting to the whims and fancies of the social network's algorithmic changes and shifting priorities (the pivot to video being one such example) and making less money off them, accounting for just about 5 percent of their total digital revenues.

But the social network's recent attempts to distance itself from the misinformation and disinformation debacle by prioritising updates from family and friends over brands and news outlets speaks volumes about the way it intends to deal with the problem, which is to deflect blame from itself and conveniently shift the burden on its users. Perhaps it's time to hit that reset button on Facebook, and use it for what it was originally intended - connect with friends while getting our news fix elsewhere.