Depending on who you talk to, Facebook will be considered either the savior or the killer of modern journalism. Roughly 600 million people watch news stories on Facebook every week, and the founder of the social network, Mark Zuckerberg, does not even hide his plans to dominate the digital news distribution. “When news is delivered as quickly as any information on Facebook, people start reading a lot more news,” Mark said in a Q&A session that year, adding that he wants to make Facebook Instant Articles become fast article pages) the main source of news experiences for people.
Facebook, which has grabbed onto Internet traffic with an iron fist, has pushed digital publishers into an uneasy alliance with the $ 350 billion giant and sparked controversy among online media about the social network's true intentions. Will the corporation subvert the entire market without a trace, or will it simply arrange the delivery of user-friendly content directly to his news feed? Throughout its history, Facebook, which today pays publishers such as Buzzfeed and the New York Times to use the video streaming service Facebook Live, has sought a mutually beneficial landlord-tenant relationship.
But if you really want to know what Facebook thinks about journalists and journalism, you should just take a look at what happened when the company quietly hired several journalists to work on a secret "popular news" project. The results are unsightly: According to five former "news curators," as they are called internally, Zuckerberg and the company are looking down on the industry and the talent that feeds it. In interviews with Gizmodo, these former curators described dire working conditions, demeaning attitudes, and a secretive and arrogant attitude from management that treated them like consumables. After being in the Facebook news dump, they became firmly convinced that the company had hired them not for journalistic work, but in order to test their news sorting algorithm on them.
Launched in January 2014, Facebook's Popular News section is one of the most coveted places on the entire Internet, located in the upper right corner of the site's pages and contains a list of the most discussed topics and links to a number of articles on each of these topics. The roughly ten journalists hired to run this section do not work from the company's New York office, but are essentially contractors.
“We were put in a meeting room for almost two and a half months,” said one former news curator (they all insisted on complete anonymity to avoid problems with Facebook due to their nondisclosure agreement). It was obvious that Zuckerberg was ready to close the project at any moment.
“We were not treated like people, but like robots,” recalled another curator.
Undoubtedly, the Facebook news section provides a significant portion of the views for news outlets. Facebook does not specify how high this share is, but anecdotal evidence suggests that inclusion in the news section adds many thousands of views to the article. It is the algorithm for selecting news in the section that determines which articles are read by site visitors, but Facebook does not disclose how it works.
The news section is run by people in their 20s and 35s, most of whom have graduated from prestigious Ivy League universities and private East Coast institutions like Columbia or New York University. They previously worked for publications such as Bloomberg, New York Daily News, MSNBC, and the Guardian. Some of the former news curators have left Facebook for New Yorker, Mashable and Sky Sports.
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According to conversations with some of the former members of the news curators group, that group has the power to determine which articles will end up at the top of the news list and, more importantly, which sites will get there. One of the team said: "We defined relevance based on our own tastes, and there was never a single standard for the quality of news."
News curators are not Facebook employees, but contractors. One former curator said that Facebook provided them with work amenities like full health insurance, half-yearly vacations, and reimbursement of fares, but did not perceive them as employees in terms of corporate culture and pleasant little things for all employees. “The lights out in the whole company happened at 8 pm while we were still working. We were kind of separated from what was happening throughout the company, but hired us on different terms,”says one of the former employees.
When news curators hired by BCForward and Pro Unlimited (which, in turn, Accenture had contracted to hire Facebook employees) came to work in the morning, they were presented with a list of hot topics, selected by Facebook's algorithm, from most popular to least popular. The curators then identified a list of articles related to those topics.
A team of curators writes a headline for each topic, followed by about three sentences of description, along with a Facebook photo or video. The curator also selects the “most appropriate post” that summarizes the topic and usually leads to the news site. Former curators told Gizmodo that they were instructed to write neutral titles and descriptions, and should only attach a video to a topic when the video was posted on Facebook. There was also a list of preferred publications from which it was supposed to take materials - New York Times, Time, Variety and a number of other traditional media. There was also a list of commonly ignored titles - World Star Hip Hop, The Blaze and Breitbart, but there were no formal instructions to ignore them. It was also recommended to avoid mentioning Twitter in the news, replacing them with the wording "social network".
Curators have the power to ban any topic. Those with whom we spoke, did this at least daily - mainly due to the lack of at least three traditional sources in the topic. As for other reasons, the regulations regarding their ban were murky and gave the curators the opportunity to delete topics for no apparent reason at all (although those with whom we talked claim that no one abused this opportunity).
In early 2015, when the Facebook news feed project was still in its early stages, there were no special instructions about the rest of the curators' work. “It was pretty simple - we were coached for basic responsibilities, and then immersed in work with might and main,” says one of the former curators.
As time went on, the demands increased, and the team of news curators began to look in accordance with the worst stereotypes about the Internet content factory. Managers nudged curators with daily rates of headlines and descriptions, gave instructions on how long it should take to write one post. The general norm was 20 posts a day. “There were documents among us describing how fast we worked - managers tried to stir up competition among employees in the hope of seeing the limits of our productivity,” said the former curator.
This burned out employees. “Most of those we started with have already left. For many, this job was a temporary option, most of us came there right after school in journalism, at least one was fired. Most of this work went to other news outlets,”another former curator shared with us.
According to one curator, managers asked contractors not to mention their work on Facebook on resumes or public pages. "It felt like they wanted to keep the magic of the hot news feed behind closed doors," says the former news curator. Despite management's efforts, it is easy to find former Facebook news staff on LinkedIn.
The reason Facebook is trying to strip its news feed is to create the illusion of an unbiased process of sorting news by an apolitical social media machine. After all, the company's entire information arm, led by senior editor Benjamin Wagner, relies on the faith of the people on Facebook as a conduit to deliver information. If a team of editors argues about popular topics in the same way a newspaper editorial board argues about what to put on the front page, Facebook risks destroying its image of a non-partisan media player, a neutral pipeline, and not a biased curator.
As such, many former curators believe that Facebook's ultimate goal is to replace human curators with robotic curators. Former curators interviewed by Gizmodo said they felt like they were training an automaton that would take their place sooner or later. As one former curator put it, it was as if it was part of an experiment that ended up being replaced.
When asked about the team of news curators and their future, a Facebook spokesperson replied: “We do not comment on rumors and speculation. As for the curators, they receive decent compensation."
According to the interviewees, their colleagues still working at Facebook feel that their work is gradually being replaced. From a group of at least 20 people, Facebook has fired eight over the past year, without replacing them with anyone. “They hired us, assuring us that they were hiring for at least a year, but after three months three of us were fired without giving any reason. We were just told that the company was cutting costs,”said one of the former curators.
Another former curator sees Facebook's ultimate goal as very simple: “This is an experiment to increase audience engagement. This involvement is the only thing they are striving for."
The information that Facebook collects from the billion users who click the news section daily could have a significant impact on the future face of the media - what we read, how we do it, and where we get our content. This future appearance is determined, if not by a team of 20 curators, then by the algorithm that these curators have trained. “Everything is subordinate to science. We were slaves to the algorithm,”said one former news curator.
By Michael Nunez, translated by Ilya Titov