Communications Major

As it continues to be the gatekeeper for more than 2 billion active users’ data, one has to wonder: What if we, and not Facebook, were the ones in the digital driving seat? What if we bought out social media platforms from the Zuckerbergs of the world and owned them ourselves, or simply demanded to know how our data is being used? What if we even owned and could sell our data for personal profit, treating it as an income stream, instead of handing it to tech firms?

Russia was involved.

Livestreaming has a long history of use as a powerful medium for accountability.

We construct precisely contoured echo chambers of affirmation that turn conviction into zeal, passion into fury, disagreements with the other side into the demonization of it.

As more tech firms employ their own editing staffs, they are being viewed as something less than news organizations, but more than simple reflections of their growing audiences.

Over the next year, we’ll start spending less time on Facebook. Those of us who used it to catch up on the news will find less of it to read. We’ll watch fewer videos, and we’ll see fewer advertisements. In theory, Facebook will make less money off us — or, at least, the rate at which it makes more and more money off us will slow.

Had you presented this scenario to Facebook executives a year ago, it would have been cause for alarm: evidence that something had gone deeply wrong on the platform, and a situation that called for an immediate solution. And yet as of today, it’s the company’s stated ambition: Facebook wants to shrink.

Fake news is actually really easy to spot -- if you know how. Consider this your New Media Literacy Guide.

The average person spends more time on Facebook than any other leisure activity surveyed by the government except watching TV and movies.