Facebook Wants To Swallow Up the Whole Internet

Facebook is trying more and more to make itself the exclusive medium for information on the Internet. As a result of this development, Facebook might become a synonym for the Internet as a whole.

The might of the Facebook empire is great. It is particularly noticeable when viewed from online news portals. Facebook is responsible for about 40 percent of the traffic for some of these portals — that means that the readers first see and click on a link to an article on Facebook, which then leads them to the news website. This user traffic via Facebook triples each year — a boon, but also a danger.

If Facebook changes its algorithms, the dependent websites can be affected as a result. An example: Facebook has for some time disadvantaged YouTube videos, as those videos that only can be found on Facebook have automatic streaming playback. External content likewise has a disadvantage from Facebook’s viewpoint: Users click on links and are led to somewhere else on the Internet. That is probably not due to altruism.

Recently, The New York Times announced that Facebook is negotiating with a few publishers for a kind of media revolution: Instead of merely linking their articles on Facebook to bring readers to their own sites, Facebook would rather directly publish content to Facebook itself.

According to the report, The New York Times, National Geographic and Buzzfeed are among those in the conversation. Officially it means they want to enable a seamless user experience — and save time: The time from clicking on a link to the loading of an article lasts about eight seconds. That is too much.

It’s about Money and Aspirations of Exclusivity

In reality, those are hardly the true reasons for these negotiations. It is obviously about money. Facebook indicated some time ago that they would like to capitalize more on their 890 million daily users by using journalism exclusive to Facebook.

The idea is to keep users in their system; by reducing external links, they can retain their users for longer periods and thereby increase their advertising revenue. Facebook has more data on their users than any publisher could ever imagine, and it utilizes this data for the placement of ads. Such targeted advertising garners much more money than randomly placed ads.

“Go where your users are” is the mantra of media world, for as long as social networks have existed. But what if there is no elsewhere? Then we are on the path toward an all-encompassing corporate Internet, where there will be no more “outside” or external websites. Then Facebook is the Internet — and we publishers would need to fear that if we don’t play along (such as YouTube), we will become increasingly suppressed. That creates a chilling effect on free speech. In the worst case scenario, it threatens the independence of journalism. We should be wary.