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THE INTERNET — Facebook is no stranger to the “rant” — long streams from its users about things that irritate them. The difference is that one was made by one of its own.
Mike Hudack, Facebook’s director of ad product management, wrote Thursday that he is disappointed by the types of articles he sees being shared on his site — “listicles” and click-bait headlines about squirrels.
Many writers from the publications Hudack called out fired back that Facebook should be working together with the news media to promote important stories.
Dino Grandoni at The Huffington Post pointed out that there is plenty of deep reporting on the Internet, but that isn’t what generates ad revenue.
“Enter Facebook, which over the past two years has very, very deliberately tried to become the biggest traffic-getter for news websites,” Grandoni wrote. “Facebook's algorithm blesses certain types of articles with a cascading effect: If it gets ‘Likes’ and ‘Shares,’ it's shown to more and more people, in turn getting more and more ‘Likes’ and ‘Shares.’ But if Facebook wants ‘good’ journalism, it can encourage it by building a computer program that relies less on whether or not a few people were in the mood to click a thumbs-up button.”
Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic also suggested that Facebook perpetuates the notion of click bait, in a Facebook comment directly on Hudack’s personal page.
“I'm not saying this as a hater, but if you asked most people in media why we do these stories, they'd say, ‘They work on Facebook,’ ” part of Madrigal’s post read. “And we (speaking for ALL THE MEDIA) would love to talk with Facebook about how we can do more substantive stuff and be rewarded.”
(If) Facebook wants 'good' journalism, it can encourage it by building a computer program that relies less on whether or not a few people were in the mood to click a thumbs-up button.
–Dino Grandoni, The Huffington Post
Matthew Yglesias of Vox — another of the publications Hudack attacked directly, for a much-shared story about washing jeans, writes that the Facebook gods have smiled on him in the past.
“I hope the Gods will be as friendly to my share of Max Fisher's brilliant 4,000 word explanation of the endless political crisis in Thailand,” Ygelesias said. “But, frankly, my experience as a veteran professional in this field is that the Facebook Gods will not smile on Max's Thailand piece. It doesn't have the key triggers of emotion, personalization, and identity-formation that drive success on Facebook.”
Pew released a study in 2013 that revealed only 22 percent of adults who use Facebook consider it a good source of news but that 78 percent of those same users get their news on the site, whether they are there for that express purpose or not.
“As one respondent summed it up, ‘I believe Facebook is a good way to find out news without actually looking for it,’ ” the study said. “ ‘If it wasn’t for Facebook news,’ wrote one respondent, ‘I’d probably never really know what’s going on in the world because I don’t have time to keep up with the news on a bunch of different locations.’ ”
