Executive Chairman and CEO of News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch, has recently criticized Facebook’s New Years Resolution to fix the infiltration of “fake news” circulating on the massively popular social media platform. In a statement, Murdoch said that news companies should be “adequately rewarded” for Facebook’s and Google’s preferences for “profitable but inherently unreliable” news outlets. The comment comes after a recent announcement from Facebook’s CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg about the aforementioned New Years Resolution. Earlier in January, Facebook announced its plans to change their algorithm to become more responsive to the preferences of individuals on the platform.
Facebook is making honesty a policy
Then, on January 19th, Zuckerberg made a follow-up announcement about how the improvement would also strive to filter the quality of news promoted on the Facebook platform. A lot of attention was brought on the subject of journalistic integrity, particularly during the 2016 Presidential Election, which is where the term fake news was popularized, even nationalized, seemingly overnight, and Facebook isn't trying to hide that it was unintentionally a major contributor to that phenomenon.
Yet it's refreshing to see the company take responsibility in a growing culture where misinformation -- and just plain dishonesty -- is commonplace. However, Murdoch, who owns the second largest media conglomerate in the U.S.
(and then some), doesn't agree that Zuckerberg's plan is the best direction the company could be taking. Murdoch expressed in an official statement that Facebook's "Recognition of a problem is one step on the pathway to cure, but the remedial measures that both companies have so far proposed are inadequate, commercially, socially and journalistically."
Honesty goes both ways
The primary gist of Murdoch's opinion is that the company should be paying publishers a carriage fee similar to how cable companies operate.
His reasoning stems from Facebook's new algorithm, certain publishers are more likely to be pushed on the social media site based on what individual users deems "reliable and trustworthy." There is a reason this could be concerning on a business level: a study from 2016 published by the Pew Research Center showed that 62% of U.S.
adults get their news from social media, with Facebook being the second most popular source. And with a website that hosts 2.07 billion active daily users, that kind of foot traffic is crucial to independent news outlets and small businesses that would otherwise be lost in a sea of search engine results.
However, it is pertinent to mention that Rupert Murdoch is the founder of Fox News and also the Chairman of News Corporation, which owns news medias like the Wall Street Journal. This ultimately points to Murdoch having the most to gain if indeed Facebook takes his advice, which only warrants the same call for transparency the media mogul is demanding from an ultimately rival company.
