We can have democracy or we can have Facebook
I&#x27;m struggling to see the argument here.<p>Facebook is a very large company, and is taking large amount of advertiser cash. That is true.<p>That money would otherwise go to publishers (possibly true, although I suspect it would go to google.)<p>What the author fails to back up is the either facebook&#x2F;democracy argument.<p>facebook could attempt to editorialise <i>all</i> content, to give a specific bias to the news feed. But I don&#x27;t see any evidence that it is, barring the bias towards &quot;virality&quot;. (again I&#x27;m not convinced that&#x27;s a function of facebook, I think its a function of society.)<p>Virtually all publishers (be it paper, radio, tv or internets) are privately funded. They all make editorial decisions about the content they commission, edit and syndicate. I suspect the argument is that because there are more than one of them, its not a concentrator of power. Unlike these entities, facebook doesn&#x27;t actually wield power, its far to incoherent. It allows certain content to flourish, which has a similar effect, perhaps.<p>I am uncomfortable with facebook the website, its trivially easy to create organise and operate a group that is contrary to the health of wider society (what the subject is, it entirely left to the reader&#x27;s preconceptions of what bad is.)<p>I don&#x27;t think facebook is the antithesis of democracy. Far from it, we are seeing more people voting. What we are seeing is western democracies struggling with people finding their own voices.<p>We are also seeing many extreme opinions. Most of them emerging after being amplified to catch eyeballs. Some of it is being driven by facebook, but a lot is being driven by the twitter-&gt;pundit-&gt;journalist-&gt;politician-&gt;journalist-&gt;pundit feedback loop.