Google and Facebook are our frenemy. Beware.

[Commentary] Google, Facebook, Twitter and any other social platform you care to name would at one time have gone to the corporate stake to defend the idea that they are not publishers or actively engaged in acts of journalism. Things are changing rapidly. A pressing question for Facebook and eventually for Google is who bears the publishing risk in this new world? When a story is found through a link, then the platform company has limited risk if challenges are made to the content. But when there is an explicit agreement to republish material on a platform built for virality, who bears responsibility for defending and protecting the journalism? Asking both Facebook and publishers directly the answer came back, “we are still working through these issues.”

There is also the looming issue of what control the giant platforms will have over content, because what amounts to a “good experience” for a Facebook users is usually measured by factors such as how long something takes to load on their phone. Editorial priorities within news organizations, on the other hand, often compromise or don’t fully prioritize speed, in order to develop more richly designed or interactive stories. If news audiences are going to increasingly migrate to mobile social platforms, then Facebook, Snapchat, WhatsApp, and others will most likely promote what works over slower presentations. In this dynamic news organizations inevitably adapt to the requirements of the platform rather than the other way round. And this is the unsettling message for the news business in these developments. The traffic to your stories, the pathways to audiences and even the shape of your newsrooms are changed by this new balance of power. The obscurity of how these systems and algorithms works has not been lifted by agreements that might raise advertising revenues. The locus of power in delivery and distribution of news has shifted, irrevocably, towards commercial companies who have priorities that often compete with those of journalism. The alternative is unclear, but must ultimately lie with news taking more responsibility for understanding the role of third-party technology and creating its own platforms in the future. How journalism will find the time or resources to do this is unclear, as the frenemy is already at the gate.

[Emily Bell is director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism]