How Facebook can influence the news, not just share it

[Commentary] Facebook doesn’t merely have the ability to dictate which already-written stories merit inclusion in its own trending news section; in some cases, the social media juggernaut can also influence which stories journalists wind up writing — and the kinds of questions they ask — in the first place.

Facebook launched a reporting tool called Signal that is designed to help journalists “monitor what topics are trending on Facebook” and “find stories as they grow in importance.” One big challenge for media outlets is that there’s no way to fact-check Facebook data because it’s proprietary. No one but Facebook knows what’s really trending on Facebook. The inability to authenticate Facebook data means newsrooms have to think hard about how heavily they lean on it. They also have to consider how — amid intense competition for Internet traffic — the desire to produce viral content might color editorial judgments. Many news sites draw large portions of their audiences from Facebook, so the temptation is to try to create content that seems likely to be shared and liked over and over. So there is a shared responsibility where the potential for abuse exists. Facebook could theoretically nudge journalists toward the topics it wants covered by showing those topics to be trending when, in fact, they are not.