social media and newsmedia

By STEVAN DOJCINOVIC NOV. 15, 2017

Facebook had made a small but devastating change. Posts made by “pages” — including those of organizations like mine — had been removed from the regular News Feed, the default screen users see when they log on to the social media site. They were now segregated into a separate section called Explore Feed that users have to select before they can see our stories. (Unsurprisingly, this didn’t apply to paid posts.)

It wasn’t just in Serbia that Facebook decided to try this experiment with keeping pages off the News Feed. Other small countries that seldom appear in Western headlines — Guatemala, Slovakia, Bolivia and Cambodia — were also chosen by Facebook for the trial.

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Facebook Says Social Media Can Be Negative For Democracy

January 22, 20184:27 PM ET MERRIT KENNEDY

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/01/22/579732762/facebook-says-social-media-can-be-negative-for-democracy

In a new commentary, the social media giant acknowledges the possibility that social media can have negative ramifications for democracy. This comes after repeated criticism that it didn’t do enough to prevent the spread of fake news that had the potential to impact the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Facebook, has been reluctant to wade into the business of sorting fact from fake news, though last year it introduced a system relying on third party fact checkers to flag particularly egregious examples.

Tech firms including Facebook have faced increasing scrutiny on Capitol Hill. Most recently, executives from Facebook, YouTube and Twitter appeared before a Senate committee last week to discuss the”steps social media platforms are taking to combat the spread of extremist propaganda over the Internet.”

Today’s discussion on Facebook is part of a series of “Hard Questions” from the social media network. Another recent post questions, “Is spending time on social media bad for us?” It stated that active interactions on social media are good for well-being. However, Facebook said that “when people spend a lot of time passively consuming information – reading but not interacting with people – they report feeling worse afterward.”