(IMAGE: AAP/GLENN HUNT)

It’s time for news media to abandon Facebook.

That’s the inevitable takeaway from the Facebook Papers’ disclosure that its algorithm is irremediably geared to outrage and simply not fit for journalism’s purpose.

That’s the takeaway, too, from a four-month trial by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to bar all comments on its Facebook news posts. Seems even the notoriously nice Canadians couldn’t restrain from what CBC News editor-in-chief Brodie Fenlon called “an inordinate amount of hate, abuse, misogyny and threats in the comments”. The toxicity meant that stories and videos were being pulled from Facebook when they knew story subjects and particular communities would be targeted for abuse. “Misinformation and disinformation were rife,” he said.

Last week the CBC confirmed it was making that ban permanent, saying it had freed the broadcaster to post more diverse stories than ever. This week there’s worse news: not only is the more advertising-desirable young market abandoning Facebook (“Boomerbook”, as it’s been tagged). Looks like it’s leaving Instagram, too, particularly in Australia. 

The trial is a real-time explanation of the jolt of understanding offered by the Facebook Papers, a tranche of internal documents leaked by whistleblower — and former Facebook product manager — Frances Haugen. (To avoid internal tracking, Haugen photographed the tens of thousands of pages of documents on screen using her phone camera.)

The papers give us a better understanding of the core Facebook problem: it’s not (as it responded to its spread of Rohingya hate speech in 2017) that it’s just really hard to moderate fake news and hate speech at scale, or that it has unaddressed privacy concerns (as the company responded to Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018). It’s that baked into the algorithm’s advertising-driven intent is the design flaw that feeds and encourages the outrage that’s carving up society.

It’s easy to brush off the reports with a “Yeah, Facebook. It’s terrible. What’s new?” But there are two key indicators that this latest round of bad news is closer to existential for the social media giant.

The company has been prepared to blow itself up to change the subject. Once “Facebook” was (per CEO and controlling shareholder Mark Zuckerberg) the heart of the company. The founders of Instagram and WhatsApp left the company, in part because they felt it was limiting the potential of their products to protect the Zuckerberg baby.

Just two years ago, Zuckerberg insisted that both products be diminished with tagging “from FACEBOOK” branding.

Now, with Meta Inc, the company has hurried on beyond all that. The original Facebook is now just one product line — and, in the metaverse, not even the most important, at least in Zuckerberg’s mind.

Meanwhile, the sharemarket seems to have shifted its rating to: “Yeah, nah.” When what was still Facebook Inc released its quarterly report recently, earnings were up, but not as much as analysts had hoped. It looked as though its increased income owed more to higher charges and the Google-Facebook duopoly gutting advertising alternatives.

Wall Street’s product cycle thinking has a name for this market milking: “cash cow”. That’s great for now, but not for the future (which is, after all, how shares are priced). The result? As Facebook became Meta its shares have slid. It’s now the smallest of the big six tech companies which, over these pandemic times, have surged to be about 25% of the value of the total value of the US sharemarket. (Back of the envelope, that makes these six about 7% of the value of Australia’s superannuation holdings.)

The outrage that built the old Facebook has been great for attention — and for the ad dollars it can leverage out of that attention — but as the CBC trial shows it’s destroying journalism’s core function to inform, entertain and build community.

News organisations respond with a “Whaddya going to do?” For news media, the platform is not a distribution tool. It’s bait to pull readers out of the platform into the organisation’s home page where they can be monetised through advertising or subscriptions. The algorithm rewards comments with virality that promotes the original post.

The assumption is: the greater the outrage, the more the traffic. But there’s a price: Australia’s courts (right up to the High Court) have suggested that publishers who play the Facebook game may be liable for defamation on comments their postings draw.

The CBC trial offers a way out here, too: when it barred comments, it found only marginal change in web traffic. Even better, staff felt better about themselves.