Comment on Facebook Is Censoring 404 Media Stories About Facebook's Censorship [404 Media]

thelucky8@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

• theangriestbird@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  i mean, they are on Facebook too. If you are a journalist or a publication, you have to go to where the people are to spread the word about your articles, even if the people are on a platform you do not like. I’ve had mixed feelings about this lately with regards to X (a neo-nazi platform) and artists that continue to use that platform. But at the end of the day, unless you are a large organization with lots of influence, you need to be on social media to survive.

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  • ryper@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    They’re not posting to Facebook because they need to. From the article:

    The silver lining here is that Facebook was already increasingly a waste of our time. The only reason we’re able to share our stories via our official Facebook page is that we’ve fully automated that process, because it is not actually worth our time to post our stories there organically. Since before we started 404 Media, we knew there was very little chance that Facebook would help us reach people, grow our audience, and make the case that people should support our journalism, so in a way we lost nothing because there’s nothing to lose.

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    • theangriestbird@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Fair point. Evidently I didn’t read 100% of the article.

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  • thelucky8@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    I strongly disagree. The case we have here is a good example why. You become too dependent on centralized services. What you need to do is using decentralized tools enabling you to control your own content and processes. If you follow tools like Facebook, Threads, Tiktok, Twitter, etc., you are on the wrong track.

    What we see in this story is something like a soft version of Chinese censorship (and censorship will become stronger the more powerful these centralized platforms become).

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    • theangriestbird@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      sure, but what is 404 Media supposed to do about that? If they stopped sharing their stories on these services, they would have no way to reach new audiences, and so they would slowly start dying off. You could argue that a larger publication like NYT could certainly take a stand like this, but traditional media isn’t exactly in a strong position right now. Decentralized platforms are useless to these publications if nobody is using them.

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      • thelucky8@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        Media outlets will have to develop their own audiences over time by using decentralized digital services. It may (seem to) take longer than using centralized services, but it’s the only way to avoid censorship and make independent decisions in their strategy and operations.

        Basically, media outlets will grow their own audiences like in the old days, just now they do with the digital help.

        This is, as we all know, what the internet was supposed to be in the beginning: a decentralized network.

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