<nettime> Hey, Mark Zuckerberg: My Democracy Isn’t Your Laboratory (NYT)

[Patrice Riemens <patrice@xs4all.nl>]

Bwo Alberto Cammozzo

Original to:
<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/15/opinion/serbia-facebook-explore-feed.html>

By  STEVAN DOJCINOVIC

BELGRADE, Serbia — My country, Serbia, has become an unwilling
laboratory for Facebook’s experiments on user behavior — and the
independent, nonprofit investigative journalism organization where I am
the editor in chief is one of the unfortunate lab rats.

Last month, I noticed that our stories had stopped appearing on Facebook
as usual. I was stunned. Our largest single source of traffic,
accounting for more than half of our monthly page views, had been 
crippled.

Surely, I thought, it was a glitch. It wasn’t.

Facebook had made a small but devastating change. Posts made by “pages”
— including those of organizations like mine — had been removed from the
regular News Feed, the default screen users see when they log on to the
social media site. They were now segregated into a separate section
called Explore Feed that users have to select before they can see our
stories. (Unsurprisingly, this didn’t apply to paid posts.)

It wasn’t just in Serbia that Facebook decided to try this experiment
with keeping pages off the News Feed. Other small countries that seldom
appear in Western headlines — Guatemala, Slovakia, Bolivia and Cambodia
— were also chosen by Facebook for the trial

<https://media.fb.com/2017/10/23/clarifying-recent-tests/>.

Some tech sites have reported that this feature might eventually be
rolled out to Facebook users in the rest of the world, too. But of
course no one really has any way of knowing what the social media
company is up to. And we don’t have any way to hold it accountable,
either, aside from calling it out publicly. Maybe that’s why it has
chosen to experiment with this new feature in small countries far
removed from the concerns of most Americans.

But for us, changes like this can be disastrous. Attracting viewers to a
story relies, above all, on making the process as simple as possible.
Even one extra click can make a world of difference. This is an
existential threat, not only to my organization and others like it but
also to the ability of citizens in all of the countries subject to
Facebook’s experimentation to discover the truth about their societies
and their leaders.

[...]

<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/15/opinion/serbia-facebook-explore-feed.html>


ciao,

Alberto
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