Response to DigiDave’s post on the Dharma of Facebook

This is late, very late. But better now than not. I wrote this in response to David Cohn’s great post-election post in November, The Dharma of Facebook: Fake News Is Downstream of Facebook’s True Purpose.

In his post, Cohn makes a key point that Facebook is really about people reiterating and building their identities, not discovering true news. And this drives a lot of its platform design.

I agree with your narrative Dave. However, to complete it, I need to add this bit.

Journalism is also about identity. Great public affairs journalism fosters a citizen-like identity with allegiance to democratic values, constitutional norms, etc. And there is history of this being done well in the traditional press, pre-digital, just as there is history of fake news even then.

However, publishers of journalism have never designed publications around a reader’s citizen identity itself, for multiple reasons.

Older business models gave them distribution control, and that’s one. But also, citizen-like identities are never complete. Media supplies information, knowledge, diverse views, collective wisdom, opinion and so forth to citizens. But the underlying value system of the reporters and editors always determine the narrative. So we have liberal and conservative-leaning journalism inevitably. Still, some identity fostering does happen, and a minimum consensus about non-negotiable values in public life, government and politics does emerge. There is a citizen-in-a-democracy identity there and it is what drives bipartisan and even non-partisan leadership.

But this citizen identity is still a subset of a fuller social avatar we house ourselves in, with all our faults and shine. We hold values as people that go beyond our connections to each other as citizens. Our values drive action far more than information does.

So when social networks step in, your argument about identity is spot on because they are designed to foster this larger identity, and even create fake ones. It feels rooted and value-centric to the user. The business models — more virality, more money — are suited to this. It’s match made in heaven, or hell, actually. And media has lost distribution control, so even if they want fight back over the identity battle, it ain’t easy.

And like you surmise that we have to see what’s happened in American society outside of fake news, I would go one step further. The sharp increase in partisanship, rancour and bitterness between the Rs and Ds — the leadership especially — over the years is running the risk of destroying citizen-identities. Some of the repair work has to begin there too.