Given the attack on the Capitol and Recent Congressional Hearings Congress As I looked at the tech giant’s role in the attack, I thought it would be helpful – and a little creepy – to look back at how I’ve drawn Facebook over the past few years. I’m taking a few days off, so I’ll leave you with this “classic” Facebook cartoon that offers a glimpse of how we got the January 6th uprising. (Stay tuned for the second of two parts!)
Facebook recently announced a major shift how it will handle news on the world’s largest social network. In a series of chipper statements and videos, Mark Zuckerberg and his crew announced that they would place less emphasis on posts from news publishers. Instead, Facebook focuses on “Bring people closer together“(As they continue to be pushed away by the news).
Translated from the utopian, this means that in their almighty algorithm they will give a higher priority to contributions shared by friends and family while Pushing news outlets by a few rungs. This comes after much effort has been put into building Facebook as the place where people get their messages. (45% of adults in the US say they get news from the social media site, and there are over two billion users worldwide.) It looks like Facebook’s struggle with fake news may have got the algorithm wranglers into all the news, whether real or wrong to throw your hands.
Facebook wasn’t the only one investing time and money bringing news to its network; the media spent millions hunting for coveted eyeballs Adjustment of content and publication directly in the “News” feed. Now Facebook wants to go back to its social media roots and focus solely on the conversations between individuals. Fortunately, it sounds like individual creators (like certain, um, cartoonists) are algorithmically performing better than large publishers.
Enjoy the cartoon, comment on it with your friends and family – and let’s hope that Zuck’s algorithm nicely suits us. (And you can always get to the point and see my cartoons and a lot of other material here on my Patreon page.)
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