1 When Media Companies Insist They’re Not Media Companies and Why it Matters for Communications Policy Philip M. Napoli James R. Shepley Professor of Public Policy Sanford School of Public Policy Duke University Durham, NC
[email protected] Robyn Caplan Research Associate Data & Society Research Institute New York, NY
[email protected] To be presented at the 2016 Telecommunications Policy Research Conference Arlington, VA 2 Introduction In 2015, Gizmodo, a Gawker Media subsidiary, published two articles which worked to unveil some of the inner workings of Facebook’s news ranking system called Trending News. The controversy that arose around these allegations, which mainly served to highlight the extent to which human beings were playing a role in determining what news was important versus algorithmic mechanisms, (see Nunez, 2016) has helped to focus public attention on the question of if and how social media platforms are functioning more as news organizations (Caplan and boyd, 2016; Isaac, 2016; Manjoo, 2016). Though much of this conversation has centered on the role of humans versus more mechanistic processes in determining what is ‘newsworthy’ (with many researchers arguing that the two processes are always inevitably intertwined), Facebook’s dominant position as an intermediary for news media has also ignited discussion of whether social media platforms such as Facebook should behave as news organizations as they begin to take on similar roles that news organizations have taken on in the past, even going so far as to hire editorial news team responsible for curating spaces like Twitter’s Moments page, Facebook’s Trending News, and SnapChat’s Featured Stories (Jarvis, 2016).