If We Don't See Beirut News, Is Facebook to Blame?

[Commentary] The recent bombings in Paris, and the outpouring of sympathy about those attacks, has sparked an ongoing debate about why there hasn’t been as much attention paid to similar events in places like Beirut. In particular, people seem concerned that “the media” hasn’t been doing as much reporting about the latter as it has about Paris, for a variety of reasons having to do with racism, cultural bias, etc. Is this really true though? The answer is: Yes and no. And the question of whose fault it is -- ours as news consumers, the media as information gatekeepers, or algorithm-driven news platforms like Facebook is even more complicated than that.

What many of the people who made this complaint seem to be saying isn’t “Why was there no news coverage of this,” but rather “Why didn’t I see any news stories about this?” There are a number of possible answers to that question. One answer is that those people either didn’t seek out the publications that reported on those incidents, or didn’t notice the stories that they published, for whatever reason. And that’s where Facebook and our disjointed and atomized experience of the news comes in. In order to help filter the noise, many people turn to platforms like Twitter and Facebook and Snapchat to show them what is important. A young millennial once said “If the news is important, it will find me” -- but what if it is important and it still doesn’t find you? Whose fault is that? In the current news environment, Facebook has to bear at least some of that blame. It is a massive platform for news, to the extent that a majority of younger users say they get their news from the social network. And the fact that its algorithm chooses what to show us and what not to show us means that it is exercising a very obvious editorial function, much like newspaper editors used to.