The Simple End to the Sensemaking Crisis
Zuck could just ban all news.
HWFO has opined since 2018 that the intersection of social media sharing mechanics and clickbait profit incentives in news media has created a perfect storm of sensemaking impossibility, turning our cell phones into an engine of runaway outrage porn and transmogrifying all information into disinformation. We yelled about that for two years, then 2020 happened, and since then the world is slowly catching up to understanding that The News isn’t, especially the younger generations. But for all the big brained Richard Dawkinses and Jonathan Haidts and mid-brained Jaron Laniers who opine about this problem in larger format media than I do, none of them seems to have identified an easy solution.
I state now I unequivocally have one. It’s so easy it’s hard to believe nobody thought of it before, and all it will take is one good conversation with Zuckerberg to pull it off.
Just ban news from Facebook entirely.
“Things going viral on social media” isn’t inherently a problem in and of itself. “News makes money from clicks” isn’t inherently a problem in and of itself. “Human beings share their outrage” isn’t a problem in and of itself. The problem arises when those three things get mixed together, like a three reactant synthesis chemical reaction. Deprive this chemical reaction of one of the three reactants and the problem goes away.
Facebook was never supposed to be a free speech platform. It was never supposed to be the town square everyone made it into. It was never Mark Zuckerberg’s idea to host the great conversations of the world. Mark doesn’t like being drug in front of congress to defend his censorship policies, doesn’t like having to justify himself in front of a bunch of people who think the internet is made of pipes, and doesn’t like how he has to spend a shitpile of money implementing censorship policies to prevent people from using his platform to enact terrorism or stage coups. When congress asked how his platform even makes money, Zuck gave a three word response that summarizes the entire deal.
“We run ads.”
Facebook is an engagement platform where people self-publish and then Facebook uses the information they self-publish to target them with advertising. That’s all Facebook is. And if banning politics and the news entirely from Facebook didn’t interfere with their ability to create engagement, and therefore sell advertising, then Facebook not only has no incentive to keep political and news content on its platform, it actually has a significant financial incentive to get rid of all of it. Banning it all reduces “bad engagement” that might drive people off the platform, and also reduces the moderation burden.
And we now know, thanks to Canada getting froggy, that banning it all wouldn’t cost Facebook a dime anyway.
On December 14, 2022, Canada passed the “Online News Act,” mandating that any social media platform on which news was shared must share its profits with the news agencies. This would have created a large tracking burden for Facebook, to tag each share of a link as either “Canadian news” or “not Canadian news,” figure out how much ad money was generated by the share of each of those Canadian news specific links, and generate a payout for each, including tracking, international taxation, and all sorts of other garbage that Facebook doesn’t ordinarily do, given how none of its other creators or sharers or influencers receive a payout from Facebook. So instead of re-engineering their entire back-end infrastructure to appease the whims of Justin Trudeau, they decided instead to ban all Canadians from reading news on Facebook reducing their payout obligation under the law to zero.
Facebook began the Canada news ban in August of last year, Trudeau got all ragemad about it, Canadian news publishers had their traffic plunge as a result of the ban with some outlets attributing a drop of as much as 30% to it, and Google decided in November to negotiate what amounts to an extortion payoff instead of bothering with any of the law’s actual rules. But the important part is this - once the Facebook engagement numbers came in, they discovered their traffic didn’t change after the news ban.
Facebook had been working some deals with news agencies in Europe, but in September they began the process of divesting entirely from them, basically threatening to roll the Canada Plan out to the EU if the EU tried to “Canada” them. Australia tried a similar law but in the end basically used it as extortion in the same way the EU did.
But based on the numbers, Facebook doesn’t have to pay the extortion fees. They can literally just stop, thumb their nose at both the governments and the news, and still retain all of their revenue purely by letting people share cat videos and advertise for apps which give people more cat videos. And since a disproportionally large portion of their moderation burden is related to politics, the net amount of moderation they’d have to do will go down instead of up once the political shitposters move over to Twitter/X, where Elon is desperately trying to create a culture war shitfest anyway.
Crystal Ball
If Zuck were to ban news from Facebook entirely, I expect we’d see the following effects:
People would care less about news and politics,
News agencies would be forced to pivot from per-click business models,
News agencies would have reduced incentive for outrage-porn pieces,
Facebook users would have a more pleasant experience, because most of the reason people quit Facebook over the last five years has been political in nature,
Facebook’s engagement would grow, not shrink, because of a reduced toxicity level,
Facebook’s ad revenue would rise as a result of its engagement growing,
Twitter/X could act as a culture war containment zone, which will assuredly be taken over by ChatGPT or other LLM-AI driven bots anyway in the next three years,
With the reduced incentive to go viral and feed echo chambers for profit, the news media might revert, ever so slightly, to producing news that’s a little less fake.
And the most curious thing about this idea, is it doesn’t take a committee or a government or an election or a consortium to achieve. The entire thing could be pulled off at the whim of one guy.
I don't know if Facebook is a very important a global incubator for mind viruses anymore. Young people seem to use it mostly to organize with older family now. The peak HF of the most impressionable minds happens on TikTok these days. And X is the most interesting and probably influential social experiment in years.
Demonstrating, like, any signs of an increase in sanity in Canada might change my mind. Sigh, though. :D
This is a brilliant idea that would be very good for Facebook. And since my fondest desire is to see Facebook simply die, I hope they never see this post.