Meet the 21st century’s reluctant media baron — Mark Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg’s Facebook exerts the kind of influence over the media landscape that would be the envy of the moguls of old, say a William Randolph Hearst or Joseph Pulitzer. The social media service he launched a dozen years ago makes invisible decisions about what articles, images and videos its 1.7 billion global users see.
The extent of its editorial clout came into sharp relief when a global protest erupted over Facebook’s decision to remove the iconic photo of a naked 9-year-old girl fleeing napalm bombs during the Vietnam War. The service has strict guidelines on nudity; what its staff didn't take into account was the historical importance of the photo.
It's unlikely the last time its editorial judgement, an amalgamation of algorithms and human reviewers, gets rebuked for a bad call, forcing it to wrestle with the same ethical questions newsrooms have for years.
“They increasingly are determining how news gets disseminated, even made, in terms of how you write headlines, how you write articles,” said the University of Southern California professor Jonathan Taplin, author of the forthcoming book "Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy."
"I would argue that they’re the most important news organization in the world.”
But Zuckerberg shrugs off the mantle of media mogul.
“We’re a technology company, we’re not a media company,” Zuckerberg said in remarks last month to a group of Italian university students. “When you think about a media company, you have people who are producing content, who are editing content, that’s not us. We’re a technology company. We build tools. We do not produce any of the content.”
The reality may be more nuanced, based on conversations with those who know Zuckerberg or have studied the company.
Zuckerberg, who created Facebook’s engineering-driven culture, doesn’t look in the mirror and see a younger version of Australian-born media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
“It’s anathema to him to be lumped in with (Viacom’s) Sumner Redstone or (21st Century Fox’s) Rupert Murdoch,” said Antonio Garcia Martinez, a former Facebook executive and author of the memoir, "Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley." “He has to deal with them. He does not see himself like that at all.”
The media tag wouldn’t help Facebook’s recruitment efforts, either.
VALUED LIKE A TECH COMPANY
Wall Street prizes tech companies over media conglomerates, and rewards Silicon Valley’s innovators with a higher price-to-earnings ratio, a calculation made by dividing a company’s current stock price by its earnings per share.
Facebook (
FB) has a price-to-earnings ratio of 61.8, based on past earnings. By this measure, it's far more in demand than a pure-play media company like Fox (
FOXA) with a P/E radio of 16.9.
“So if Zuckerberg wants to deflate (Facebook’s) value by like two-thirds, then by all means, be a media company,” said Roger Entner, founder and lead analyst with the consulting firm Recon Analytics.
Some industry watchers say Facebook has more in common with a telecommunications company like AT&T or Verizon Wireless than it does with a traditional media company like CBS. Its myriad platforms, including mobile applications WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, connect a billion people a month.
It even had ambitious plans to beam Internet service to sub-Saharan Africa via a satellite that was destroyed earlier this month, when a SpaceX rocket blew up on a launchpad in Florida.
“They’re clearly a communication platform,” said Cowen and Co. Internet analyst and media observer John Blackledge.
LEGAL BENEFITS
Certain legal advantages accrue to online platforms like Facebook that distribute content, but steer clear of creating it.
Facebook benefits from an obscure provision of the Telecom Act of 1996 that shields online operators from liability associated with the speech and actions of third parties who use the site, notes Adam Thierer, a senior research fellow at Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
“Traditional media companies do not enjoy the same degree of protection,” Thierer said via email. “Thus, Facebook doesn't want to lose that valuable legal shield from potentially onerous liability.”
But try as it might to avoid the media label, Facebook’s editors and algorithms increasingly make judgment calls that would be familiar to anyone working in a newsroom. They’re arbiters in determining which articles and images to show the 105 million American adults who get their news from the site, according to Pew Research Center.
“That is front and center of what we do as journalists,” said Edward Wasserman, dean of the University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
Facebook's stumble over the 1972 Vietnam photo came close on the heels of another series of revelations that highlighted its hand in determining what news articles and videos its users see.
This spring, an ex-staffer who worked on the "Trending" topics feature accused former colleagues of squelching conservative views and news sources from the list of most popular news topics. The social network denied any bias. But Zuckerberg, in an unusual move, met with conservative leaders to deflect criticism the network exhibited a liberal slant, and this summer, Facebook removed the team of editorial “curators” from the equation.
It also took steps to change the main news feed to display more posts from friends and family — and re-asserted its neutrality, saying “we do not favor specific kinds of sources — or ideas."
Facebook sees its role in determining what users see as less an exercise in editorial discretion than a delicate balancing act, between enabling expression and protecting its community.
"These are difficult decisions and we don't always get it right,” Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg wrote in a letter of apology to Norway’s prime minister, which was obtained by Reuters, adding, “We intend to do better.”
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