With protests in the St Louis suburb of Ferguson becoming more peaceful as the week moves on, one of the more curious angles on the tragedy and chaos there has been an online media debate over a perceived lack of news on the incident being viewed on Facebook timelines.
Several high-profile pieces have contrasted Facebook coverage with its most prominent social rival, Twitter, on the topic.
Elaine Verdon, youth communications director with Dublin media agency Thinkhouse, told The Irish Times criticism of Facebook in this regard was however "harsh" considering it's "essentially a curated feed of what people like".
DCU senior lecturer in marketing Theo Lynn said some of the pieces discussing the matter are possibly confusing the “platform with the people” as well as “presenting a degree of importance that may not be there”.
Lack of news
Heavily shared articles from Matthew Ingram and Brad Stone – senior writers at online technology news site Gigaom and Businessweek.com respectively – have commented on a lack of news on the Ferguson situation appearing in Facebook news feeds as opposed to that of Twitter. Both cite the algorithm employed by Facebook to present users with their individual news feed as being at the core of this. The algorithm is based largely on previous behaviour however. Lynn – who described the issue as “something of a non-story” – said it may be a case that with such pieces there’s an anxiousness to see “what is the Twitter angle” on any big news story.
Meanwhile Verdon said with regards to Ferguson, expectations that people’s Facebook news feeds should adhere to whatever news is breaking is also “putting an unrealistic expectation on what the general public really wants”.
Lists
As Ingram noted in his piece, Facebook users can “create topic-driven lists”, though he added that “the site doesn’t spend much time promoting them”.
However Verdon said she follows “a lot of current affairs and news sites, so for me [Ferguson] did play out, I could see things happening as they were breaking”.
Facebook’s appetite to become a source for breaking stories has been in evidence this year with the social network announcing FB Newswire, powered by Dublin-based social news agency Storyful in April.
The focus of FB Newswire though is to “make it easier for journalists and newsrooms to find, share and embed newsworthy content from Facebook in the media they produce” as Facebook’s director, news and global media partnerships Andy Mitchell put it at the time.
