Facebook and competition for the marketplace of ideas

This week’s news that the curators of Facebook’s trending news section may have systematically discriminated against conservative views gives shape to inchoate concerns about the power of online platforms to manipulate political discourse. This comes on the heels of Facebook employees asking Mark Zuckerberg whether the platform should try to stop a Donald Trump presidency. But these concerns are not limited to Facebook. Google, for instance, could also steal an election.

Editorial discretion in news isn’t news

Be it indirectly, such as through algorithm design, or directly, such as by hand curating what is listed as “trending” news, these platforms have outsized and underappreciated power over the contemporary political mood. First Amendment, media, and Internet scholars (alongside plenty of others) have been debating what this means for decades — but this week’s news that Facebook may have been actively using this power gives new exigency to these concerns. So, what should we do about them? My answer: Nothing — the market for marketplaces of ideas is strong, and the alternatives are worse. The first question to ask is not whether Facebook’s potential manipulation of what it identifies as trending news is problematic. Rather, it is to ask why Facebook is in a position to decide what counts as trending news at all. Facebook competes in the broad and dynamic information, media, and news marketplace. It competes with Twitter as a dominant social media platform. It competes with Google’s search, e-mail, and video businesses. And it is competing — alongside the likes of Google and Twitter — with traditional news outlets. Were Facebook a traditional newspaper, its “trending news” would be the equivalent of the front page. And just like a newspaper, Facebook exercises editorial discretion in deciding what gets featured in that extremely valuable space. Indeed Facebook must exercise some form of discretion. Even if stories were selected on an entirely algorithmic basis, the design of the algorithm would affect the sort of stories that get highlighted as trending.

What’s new about Facebook news?

Facebook’s ability to use its editorial discretion to shape the news alarms many because of its sheer size: Facebook has over 100 times as many US users as the New York Times has subscribers (about 160 million, compared to about 1.4 million); 50 times as many viewers as Fox News Channel’s most popular show (O’Reilly Factor, 3.42 million viewers); and more than 6 times as many US users as all three nightly network news programs combined (approximately 24 million). There is no doubt that Facebook has become one of modern America’s primary sources of news. Even very minor changes in what news Facebook shares, or how it presents that news, could have very substantial effects. At the same time, most Americans already don’t trust social media as a source of news. This is the more critical aspect of the issue. News is one of the important dimensions along which Facebook, Twitter, and Google — and all other online information platforms — are competing for user attention. There will be missteps as they compete and differentiate themselves from one another. But even traditional media often gets it wrong. But Facebook knows that establishing itself as a reputable source of news is important for its long-term success in the digital economy. We’re used to things being a bit different in the platform-based Internet economy. The market analysis is more complicated with scale and network effects. Rather than a half dozen national newspapers, we are likely to have fewer competitors offering (and shaping) news in the online marketplace of ideas. But this is a dynamic, Schumpeterian, market. Each of those firms is competing dearly to be the marketplace, not just to participate in it — this is the market for the marketplace of ideas. Firms like Facebook are still trying to get their footing — and the consequences if they get it wrong could be substantial. Entirely independent from the unfortunate prospect of governmental scrutiny, the reputational consequences for Facebook for this incident could be substantial. The last thing we should do is introduce regulation into the equation. We cannot depoliticize the news by putting it under the aegis of regulation. Regulation is inherently political, captured constantly by our political masters of the day. The monopolistic competition of the platform economy is preferable to the monopoly of the political economy. The better corrective is the distrust and discussion that we see of Facebook’s practices today. The remedy for bad speech, in this case as in others, remains more speech.

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