We once again have to hear the nine most terrifying words in the English language: “We’re Facebook, and we’re here to fix the news.” This time, the solution from the social media giant is to deliver breaking news via chatbot. On Friday, Meta announced that it has partnered with several new organizations, including CNN and Fox News, to provide real-time headlines and information via Meta AI.
The full list of partners for the new initiative, which will see the company’s chatbot and other AI products able to serve up information on breaking news stories, will also include Fox Sports, French publisher Le Monde Group, the People Inc. portfolio of media brands (which includes People, Food and Wine, Travel and Leisure, and Entertainment Weekly, among others), The Daily Caller, The Washington Examiner, and USA Today. It’s a full-spectrum selection of down-the-middle-ish outlets and straight-up right-wing activist publications, so basically exactly what you would expect out of the platform run by a Trump-aligned CEO.
According to Meta, if you ask its Meta AI about current events, it’ll now be able to receive information from recently published news stories and links to read more timely content from “more diverse content sources.” The company says its goal is to eventually “provide something for everyone by continuing to add new content sources and topics.”
At this point, Meta has a long and storied history of bringing users the news in new ways that ultimately end up making everything worse. Back in 2016, when the company had its now long-dead “Trending news” module, it came out that the company wasn’t neutrally serving up algorithmically chosen stories as many may have thought and was instead curating stories behind the scenes. Once that came to light, the company did get rid of humans and immediately unleashed a spate of misinformation amplified by the algorithm that couldn’t discern fact from fiction.
Shortly after that, in an attempt to boost its video platform, the company started shoveling money into publishers’ pockets to push them to create video content, leading to the great “Pivot to Video” era of the digital news industry. Then they pulled the plug on that plan, and all that money that publishers banked on eventually dried up and took down their operations.
That doesn’t even start to touch on all of the publishers who found a huge audience on Facebook only to have it evaporate entirely as a result of an unannounced and unexplained change in the algorithm that deprioritized them, or the massive amount of misinformation and propaganda that has run wild on the platform in its post-fact-check era.
But surely just feeding information into the black box of a chatbot for it to sort out will end well. And there’s no way that publishers regret letting their information get aggregated in real-time, as if Google’s AI Overviews haven’t provided a clear example of how that type of content kills click-throughs to the site so people actually read the article. This is going to be the time Meta finally solves news. Or kills it. What’s the difference, really?
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