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For casual observers of America’s dystopian media scene, it might have looked like vaguely heartening news when Facebook, the mother of all media platforms, announced a new model for generating content on the social networking site, one that—gasp!—could produce an actual steady revenue stream for actual working writers.

But as is always the case with Mark Zuckerberg’s great Leviathan of global connectivity, the apparent scaling up of sharing-economy platforms is likely, in this instance, to shore up the woefully top-heavy and unequal journalistic status quo. As New Republic staff writer Jacob Silverman notes, Facebook’s new plan to host original content on the site appears to be little more than a way to formalize the interminable hustle known as the digital freelancing life: a very public and networked series of appeals for public favor and Facebook-branded likes that looks to be less a stable job in its own right than an endless regress of small-bore job applications, playing out in the truth-challenged agoras of the Zuckersphere. The company’s set of ballyhooed content accessories for this new content push clearly nudges journalists down the path of compulsive self-branding, with customized newsletters, video-hosting capabilities, and other gizmos formatted to feed the muse of endless, outraged distractibility online.

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What this self-promotional model will probably mean to already underfunded and overstretched freelance merchants of content is an all-too-familiar saga, Silverman writes. As traditional outlets have fragmented and broken down, journalism “risks becoming an endless hustle, the constant accumulation of followers and efforts at self-monetization, the core product being almost as important as all the other trappings of being a digital personality.”

To see the market logic of this transformation in action, one just has to ponder the business model for the high-profile newsletter platform Substack, which Facebook doubtless regards as proof of concept for its own content plans. While Substack, too, appears to offer a great measure of independence and potential audience growth for its journalistic recruits, the way its content strategy has shaken out, past the company’s initial giddy venture-capital phase, has a sickeningly familiar feel:

 

Substack has grown quickly, but like many platforms that aspire toward what they call editorial neutrality, it’s found itself charged with favoring certain types of writers—largely white, male contrarians with a talent for Twitter theatrics—and with perpetuating some of the industry inequities it claims to solve.

 

Even with its accumulating baggage, Substack still qualifies as a success. It does so while picking favorites. The company has paid a number of writers—through fellowships, grants, and its Substack Pro program—but the deal terms are often unknown. (The writer Rick Paulas has put together a list of people who he believes are part of the Substack Pro program.) The site is very much a long-tail operation, where perhaps a few dozen lucky ones will make a good living and the rest will shake their cups for meager rewards. (Which, again, sounds a lot like the conventional media system these companies claim to disrupt.)

 

The specter of a virtual monopoly power like Facebook moving into this same market is more than a little unnerving. The social-networking giant has already wreaked a great deal of destruction in the already beleaguered journalism industry, with its past diktat for all and sundry news organizations to “pivot to video” if they wanted to secure a stable perch in the engagement-minded world of digital content. (Spoiler alert: There was no empirically defensible rationale for the great video-pivot, and the resulting bloodbath senselessly sacrificed still more digital journalism jobs.) 

It gets worse. Facebook has also infamously knuckled under to bogus complaints from the right about alleged bias on the platform to systematically elevate the most risible, lie-infested agitprop from the conservative mediasphere. (That scarcely anyone today recalls that the company actually advised the 2016 Trump campaign on its own digital outreach strategy speaks volumes about the company’s soulless devolution over the past decade-plus.) 

So when a proven bad-faith actor in our politics, which also happens to be the planet’s most enormous and influential media platform, sets its sights on creating original content, one doesn’t have to be a doomsaying Luddite to express genuine alarm over the likely outcome:

 

Imagine Facebook—with its data-driven, amoral attitude toward publishing, where everything truly is just “content” coming down the production line—deciding to give deals to some of its most popular media personalities. If Facebook’s building out a content operation, it would only be logical to cement business ties with right-wing personalities Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino, whose posts—chock-full of hateful disinformation—are often among the most shared on Facebook. The company could at once fight off accusations of anti-conservative bias while establishing itself as a platform open to a “diversity” of views. And the scale and promotional opportunities it can offer media personalities would be unprecedented, far beyond anything available to Substackers. Rather than a newsletter company, Facebook would be operating more like cable news or YouTube, minting the next generation of multiplatform stars.

 

In other words, the profession formerly heralded as the accountability-minded “fourth estate” in our democracy is now on track to host a race-to-the-punditry bottom without even the semblance of any basic fidelity to truth-telling, let alone any residual commitment to upholding a viable public democratic discourse. Be afraid. 

—Chris Lehmann, editor

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