Mark Zuckerberg. Demotix/Lino De Vallier. All rights reserved.Many online platforms are eager to up their market share by controlling more of what their users see. Almost none have made quite as much progress on this as Facebook. I here describe two recent innovations from the firm, “Instant Articles” and “internet.org” to give a sense of Facebook’s capacity to shape the communications landscape.
A great number of the key measures of social network market share point to Facebook's dominance, including as a source of media traffic. Whether the term 'monopoly' is accurate here is an unnecessary complexity. For the purposes of this discussion, the immense market position it enjoys in managing the public's communications is sufficient to warrant questioning the classification of its service.
This is a story of media hegemony on an unprecedented scale. It is about the free flow of information as key to democracy and the trouble we have effectively engaging that as a society.
