During a discussion in Rome recently, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg denied that his company is a media entity. “No, we are a tech company, not a media company,” he said. But is that description accurate? Not really.
Zuckerberg may not want to admit it, but Facebook is one of the largest and most powerful media companies in the world, and getting larger.
The Facebook co-founder told his Italian audience that the social network isn’t a media company because “we do not produce any content.” Instead, Facebook just builds tools that allow users to interact with each other, which includes sharing news, he said.
But is creating content the only way to define whether a company is a media company? No. To take just one recent example, The Huffington Post didn’t create much of its own content in the early days, before it hired a reporting staff. Users created blog posts and HuffPo distributed and monetized them.
Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017
Despite that, the Post was clearly a media company. In the same way, Facebook takes advantage of content created by its users—users who in many cases are publishers and news outlets. It distributes that content and monetizes it through advertising.
In the current media landscape, control over distribution has become almost as important as the actual creation of content, and that has given Facebook a huge amount of power.
Most of that power is expressed through the company’s control over its news-feed algorithm, which ultimately determines what content gets shown to which users. With more than 1.5 billion users, a single algorithm tweak can make the difference between success and failure for a publisher.
As a number of observers have pointed out in the wake of Facebook’s recent changes to its “trending topics” feature, the choices that are made via the algorithm are fundamentally editorial—what to show and what to hide, what to make more prominent and what to make less prominent. That’s what news entities used to do.
Not only that, but Facebook is paying publishers and celebrities an estimated $50 million or so to produce video for its platform, which also clearly makes it a media company.
The social network may argue that it doesn’t tell its publishing partners what they should be creating for that money, but the fact that it is pushing video—and that its algorithm clearly favors certain kinds of video content over other kinds—helps determine what gets promoted.
Despite this, Facebook has consistently refused to admit that it has any journalistic responsibilities. Its argument continues to be that the algorithm is simply a reflection of its users’ desires, as though algorithms aren’t created by human beings.
There are a couple of reasons why Facebook is so adamant that it is a tech company and not a media company. One is the risk that it might be forced to pay more attention to issues like free speech and censorship and journalistic integrity than it really wants to, which would be a huge hassle.
Another reason is that tech companies are valued much more highly by investors than media companies, which also helps explain why some media startups, including BuzzFeed, have also tried to argue in the past that they are tech companies. But just saying it doesn’t make it true.