Douthat: Facebook’s subtle news empire

In one story people tell about the news media, we have moved from an era of consolidation and authority to an era of fragmentation and diversity. Once there were three major television networks, and everyone believed what Walter Cronkite handed down from Sinai.

Then came cable TV and the talk radio boom, and suddenly people could seek out ideologically congenial sources and tune out the old mass-culture authorities.

Then finally the Internet smashed the remaining media monopolies, scattered news readers to the online winds and opened an age of purely individualized news consumption.

How compelling is this story? It depends on what you see when you look at Facebook.

In one light, Facebook is a powerful force driving fragmentation and niche-ification. It gives its users news from countless outlets, tailored to their individual proclivities. It allows those users to be news purveyors in their own right, playing Cronkite every time they share stories with their 'friends.' And it offers a platform to anyone, from any background or perspective, looking to build an audience from scratch.

But seen in another light, Facebook represents a new era of media consolidation, a return of centralized authority over how people get their news.

From this perspective, Mark Zuckerberg's empire has become an immensely powerful media organization in its own right, albeit one that effectively subcontracts actual news gathering to other entities. And its potential influence is amplified by the fact that this Cronkite-esque role is concealed by Facebook's self-definition as 'just' a social hub.

These two competing understandings have collided in the past few weeks, after it was revealed that Facebook's list of 'trending topics' is curated by a group of toiling journalists, not just an impersonal algorithm, and after a former curator alleged that decisions about which stories 'trend' are biased against conservative perspectives.

This news outraged some conservatives, but others shrugged. After Zuckerberg summoned a collection of right-of-center mavens to his Silicon Valley throne room — er, boardroom — for an airing of grievances, one of the participants, Glenn Beck, criticized his fellow conservatives for treating Facebook like a left-wing monolith, rather than an open platform that has served many conservatives (himself included) very well.

To which Ben Domenech, author of the popular conservative newsletter The Transom, retorted that Facebook is obviously not just an open platform, that its curation of the news automatically makes it an important gatekeeper as well, and that it's therefore 'an act of foolishness or cowardice' to fail to hold displays of bias to account.

Who's right? Well, Beck is right that Facebook is different in kind from any news organization before it and that traditional critiques of media bias — from the Chomskyite left as well as from the right — don't apply neatly to what it's doing.

Between the algorithmic character of (much of) its news dissemination, the role of decentralized user choice, and the commercial imperatives of personalization, there's little chance that the Facebook experience will ever bear the kind of ideological stamp that, say, the Time-Life empire bore in Henry Luce's heyday.

But Domenech is right that Zuckerberg's empire still needs vigilant watchdogs and rigorous critiques. True, any Facebook bias is likely to be subtler-than-subtle. But because so many people effectively live inside its architecture while online, there's a power in a social network's subtlety that no newspaper or news broadcast could ever match.

In a period of crisis, that subtle power could be exercised in truly disturbing ways: Consider, for instance, the reported conversation at a Facebook meeting about whether the company might have an obligation to intervene against a figure like Donald Trump — something that a tweak of its news algorithm or even its Election Day notification could theoretically help accomplish.

But the more plausible (and inevitable) exercise of Facebook's power would be basically unconscious — as, I suspect, any suppression of conservative stories may have been.

Human nature being what it is, a social network managed and maintained by people who tend to share a particular worldview — left-libertarian and spiritual-but-not-religious, if I judge the biases of Silicon Valley right — will tend to gently catechize its users into that perspective.

And of course this runs deeper than politics. The way even an 'impersonal' algorithm is set up, the kind of stories it elevates and buries, is also a form of catechesis, a way of teaching human beings about how they should think about the world.

Virtual architecture tells stories no less than the real variety: Like stained-glass windows in a medieval cathedral, even what seem like offhand choices — like Google's choice of its Doodle subject, to cite a different new media entity — point people toward particular icons, particular ideals.

So even if you don't particularly care how Facebook treats conservative news sources, you should still want its power constantly checked, critiqued and watched — for the sake not just of its users' politics but their very selves and souls.

Ross Douthat is a columnist for the New York Times.