March 2018, Hamburg: Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Axel Springer SE and President of the Federal Association of German Newspaper Publishers, at 'Online Marketing Rockstars' fair. Axel Heimken/Press Association. All rights reserved.
When asked in December 2016 what kind of a company Facebook was exactly, Mark Zuckerberg replied that "Facebook is a new kind of platform. It's not a traditional technology company. It's not a traditional media company." Zuckerberg has always been reluctant to describe his company as a publishing house, but the control he has acquired over who gets to see what and when makes him the most powerful news editor the world has ever seen and although Facebook does not produce any content of its own, the news publishers’ dependence on the social medium for the distribution of their content has turned Facebook into a de facto news company.
One of the more serious consequences of this development is that neither the news publishers nor the news consumers have much control over the flow of news content. Instead, Facebook can decide which user sees what type of information, based on detailed psychographic profiles. The company therefore has a considerable impact on how its more than two billion active users perceive the world. How easy it is for Facebook to affect the sensitivities of its users has been proven by a number of controversial experiments conducted by Facebook without its users’ knowledge. In 2013 for example, a group of psychologists tried to see whether or not a change in the news feed can alter the mental states of Facebook users. By tweaking the algorithm, the scientists tried to find out whether exposure to positive or negative posts would lead to emotional contagion. They found strong evidence for mood alterations on Facebook. “When positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred”, they concluded. The company therefore has a considerable impact on how its more than two billion active users perceive the world.
