Facebook Is the ‘Mainstream Media’ Now
By: Will Oremus
Tags: Media, Election 2020, Pattern Matching, Facebook

Facebook Is the ‘Mainstream Media’ Now

The election proved that social platforms are the new gatekeepers

Photo: Pool/Getty Images

For half a decade, debates have simmered as to how the news media should cover Donald Trump’s candidacy and presidency. Recall the Huffington Post consigning his GOP primary campaign to its entertainment section in 2015; the New York Times’ 2017 handwringing as to whether to call his lies “lies;” the AP’s 2019 disavowal of “euphemisms for racism;” and the ongoing questions of whether his speeches and rallies should be covered live.

An implicit assumption in these critiques was that established media juggernauts could impact how the broader electorate understood Donald Trump. If they failed to cover him with sufficient bluntness and urgency, critics warned, his misdeeds would go unchecked and voters would fail to punish him at the polls. While not every warning was heeded, it’s safe to say that by the end of his term, no one who regularly read and believed the New York Times, watched CNN, or listened to NPR could fail to grasp that he was a liar, a bully, and a threat to American democracy, among other seemingly disqualifying traits.

And yet: He received some 7 million more votes in 2020 than he had in 2016. Even as Joe Biden edged past him in critical states by week’s end, a conclusion that circulated Tuesday night remained inescapable: The Trump that the titans of traditional media had exposed ad nauseam as a dangerous buffoon did seem to be the same one that 70 million Americans voted for.

Which raises the question: Where were those 70 million people getting their information? To be sure, some portion of them probably did get the mainstream media’s message and voted for him anyway, for various reasons legitimate or otherwise. But it also seems clear that the big legacy media outlets simply don’t control the national narrative the way they once did. As to where that influence now resides, we can find some clues from Nielsen ratings, Pew Research, and other recent media studies — and in the starring role that platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have come to play in politics and elections.

The Pattern

The distinction between social media and media is becoming obsolete.

Undercurrents

Podcasts may be the next frontier in online content moderation. It was on his podcast that Steve Bannon suggested Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray should be beheaded, and various podcast hosts faced pressure to act after Twitter and other social platforms did. The podcast platform Stitcher suspended Bannon altogether, while Spotify and Soundcloud took down the offending episode, Gizmodo reported. This comes a week after Spotify took heat for an episode of Joe Rogan’s wildly popular podcast that featured an interview with Infowars conspiracy-monger Alex Jones, who is banned from other major social platforms. That put Spotify in a particularly awkward position, given that it signed Rogan to a blockbuster exclusive deal earlier this year that was reported to be worth $100 million. The Wall Street Journal reported that the Rogan episode had sparked tensions within Spotify over its content policies.

It was on his podcast that Steve Bannon suggested Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray should be beheaded, and various podcast hosts faced pressure to act after Twitter and other social platforms did. The podcast platform Stitcher suspended Bannon altogether, while Spotify and Soundcloud took down the offending episode, Gizmodo reported. This comes a week after Spotify took heat for an episode of Joe Rogan’s wildly popular podcast that featured an interview with Infowars conspiracy-monger Alex Jones, who is banned from other major social platforms. That put Spotify in a particularly awkward position, given that it signed Rogan to a blockbuster exclusive deal earlier this year that was reported to be worth $100 million. The Wall Street Journal reported that the Rogan episode had sparked tensions within Spotify over its content policies. California voters this week quietly remolded the future of tech regulation. They approved a pair of ballot measures, Proposition 22 and Proposition 24, that are viewed as bellwethers for the gig economy and online privacy. Prop 22 affirms the business models of Lyft, Uber, Doordash, and other on-demand apps by classifying gig workers as independent contractors rather than employees, while adding some basic protections, such as a wage floor. It also makes it harder for them to unionize. In OneZero, my colleague Sarah Kessler explained what the vote changes and what it doesn’t, while professors Veena Dubal and Meredith Whittaker lamented the new law as a “grim precedent” and offered a blueprint for gig workers to fight back. Proposition 24, meanwhile, reworks the ambitious but flawed consumer privacy law that California passed two years ago, closing loopholes that had let big tech companies off the hook. Privacy advocates generally agreed Prop 24 would represent an improvement, but also that it was flawed in its own right, and some had opposed it as entrenching a subpar privacy framework with insufficient protections for vulnerable groups. (The nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation neither endorsed nor opposed it, calling it a “mixed bag of partial steps backwards and forwards.”) As with Proposition 22, it is likely to serve as a reference point for other state laws, and perhaps ultimately federal legislation.

Tweets of the week

Princeton professor Arvind Naryanan on how data voids help to explain false election news on Twitter.

Vice’s Casey Johnston imagines Trump as an aggrieved gamer.

Hand-scrawled chart of the week