What do we really want out of Facebook?

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[Commentary] Do we want Facebook to act like a news site?

It certainly never started out that way — it was supposed to give you headlines about your friends, not world events. To some end, that is still what Facebook is; impartiality, while a watchword for American journalism, has never been so for Facebook. In fact, it actively didn't want to be impartial — it wanted to be personalized. Liberal users might be more interested in liberal news. Conservatives might want to see conservative news. On the feed, Facebook doesn't care one way or the other, as long as users see what they want. Yet we, as users, made Facebook into a news source. And it's adapted according to our habits. If we wanted a pure, unadulterated, democratic link machine, after all, there is, for example, Reddit. Reddit has no algorithm. It prides itself on the fact. The things that get the most positive votes rise to the top of the site, as the most noteworthy things on the Internet.


What do we really want out of Facebook?