Which of these causes you most anxiety?<\/p>\n
Who can now seriously doubt that Facebook is a publisher as opposed to what it likes to say it is: a tech platform? \u00a0Niall Fergusson writes:<\/p>\n
\"According to Zuckerberg, Facebook is \u2018a tech company, not a media company\u2026 We build the tools; we do not produce any content\u2019. Yet in practice, according to a recent Reuters investigation, \u2018an elite group of at least five senior executives regularly directs content policy and makes editorial judgment calls.\u2019 In the words of Espen Egil Hansen, the editor-in-chief of the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten, Zuckerberg is now \u2018the world\u2019s most powerful editor\u2019.\"<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
My answer to my original question it's that fully 30% of American adults get their news from Facebook. \u00a0That's mind-numbing in more senses than one. \u00a0As Robert Harris recently said about 1930s Germany:<\/p>\n
\"You got spoon-fed the news that you wanted and it was all very comforting. \u00a0One gets that now: everyone can get the news they want. \u00a0They don\u2019t have to think: they are just comforted in their prejudices, and there is a totalitarian vibe in the air.\"<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
For more on all this, read\u00a0Niall Fergusson<\/a>\u00a0whose\u00a0new book, The Square and the Tower: Networks, Hierarchies and the Struggle for Global Power\u00a0<\/em>(Allen Lane) \u2013 and Sam Leith<\/a> (talking to Robert Harris about his new book,\u00a0Munich,\u00a0<\/em>Hutchinson).<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Which of these causes you most anxiety? At the end of June 2017, the number of active Facebook users (visiting the site at least once a month) passed 2,000,000,000 WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram \u2014 all owned by Facebook \u2014 have...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7077","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-news-and-updates"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7077","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7077"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7077\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7077"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7077"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}