As Facebook takes on a larger and larger role as a platform for journalism, the debate over what its duties or responsibilities are towards the media industry—or if in fact it has any at all—continues to heat up. The deal that the giant social network has cut with a number of media partners, including the New York Times and the Guardian, is that it will help make their articles look if they are published directly through its mobile app under the “Instant Articles” program. In return, Facebook agrees to give those outlets a share of the revenue generated from the advertising around those articles.
This seems like a fairly straightforward business deal: Media companies get better distribution and a better mobile interface, and they get either 70% or 100% of the advertising revenue, depending on whether they sell the ads or they let Facebook sell them. But the arrangement has raised all kinds of difficult questions about whether it is actually a Faustian bargain—one that provides a much greater long-term benefit for Facebook than it does for the media outlets that provide the content.
One of the questions at the center of this debate is whether Facebook has any kind of duty or responsibility to the news or to journalism. In a piece he wrote for Medium, CUNY journalism professor Jeff Jarvis tried to tackle some of these issues, and he splits it into two related questions: 1) Should an informed society be part of Facebook’s mission? and 2) Does the company bear any kind of civic responsibility for the news?
Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017
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