Why Will Breitbart Be Included in ‘Facebook News’? - The New York Times

Growth has always been the end game for Facebook. The company’s onetime internal credo, “Move fast and break things,” was about a need for rapid, sometimes reckless innovation in service of adding more users, market share and ad dollars, while its early mission statement, “Make the world more open and connected,” was a friendly way of expressing a desire for exponential growth. The company’s new mission statement, “Bring the world closer together,” is a friendlier way of saying the same thing — after all, you can’t bring people closer together if you don’t acquire them as active users first. Growth at any cost is a familiar mantra inside Facebook as well, as an internal memo surfaced last year by BuzzFeed News revealed; subsequent investigations by The Times detailed a company “bent on growth.”

But the costs of this growth — election interference, privacy violations — are passed on to users, not absorbed by Facebook, which takes a reputational hit but generally maintains, if not increases, market share and value. The real threat to Facebook isn’t bad P.R., it’s alienating its user base.

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Through this lens, it makes perfect sense that Facebook should want to publicly court conservative audiences that seethe at what they perceive as Facebook’s liberal bias. And while the outcomes of Facebook’s decisions have serious political consequences, Mr. Zuckerberg and his fellow decision makers at the company view their decision to choose both publishers and off-the-record dining partners in terms of user acquisition strategy. According to Bloomberg, publications for Facebook News were chosen after surveying users and studying news consumption habits on the platform. Breitbart’s inclusion suggests that it checked enough of Facebook’s boxes, despite its toxicity. The same goes for dinner with Mr. Carlson, who launders white nationalist talking points and speaks to a large audience on cable TV every weeknight. The pattern is clear: If an entity or individual achieves a certain level of scale and influence, then the company will engage earnestly.

It’s telling that Facebook would look to Mr. Carlson or Breitbart and interpret a large audience and influence as a stand-in for authority and credibility. What else should we really expect from a company that refuses to meaningfully distinguish those who share hyperpartisan vitriol from those joyfully sharing baby pictures? When scale is the prism through which you view the world, that world becomes flat. When everyone becomes a number, everyone starts to look the same.

Because Mr. Zuckerberg is one of the most powerful people in politics right now — and because the stakes feel so high — there’s a desire to assign him a political label. That’s understandable but largely beside the point. Mark Zuckerberg may very well have political beliefs. And his every action does have political consequences. But he is not a Republican or a Democrat in how he wields his power. Mr. Zuckerberg’s only real political affiliation is that he’s the chief executive of Facebook. His only consistent ideology is that connectivity is a universal good. And his only consistent goal is advancing that ideology, at nearly any cost.

Source: The New York Times

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