The full list of partners for the new initiative, in which the company’s chatbots and other AI products will be able to provide information on breaking news stories, also includes Fox Sports, French publisher Le Monde Group, the People Inc. portfolio of media brands (which includes People, Food & Wine, Travel & Leisure and Entertainment Weekly, among others), The Daily Caller, The Washington Examiner and USA Today. It’s a full-spectrum selection of down-the-middle-ish outlets and straight-up right-wing activist publications, so basically what you’d expect from a platform run by a Trump-aligned CEO.
According to Meta, if you ask its Meta AI about current events, it will now be able to get information from recently published news stories and links to read more timely content from “more diverse content sources.” The company says its goal is to ultimately “provide something for everyone by adding new content sources and topics.”
At this point, Meta has a long and storied history of bringing news to users in new ways that ultimately make everything worse. In 2016, when the company had a now long-defunct “Trending News” module, it emerged that the company was not presenting stories chosen by algorithms neutrally, as many might have thought and was instead curating stories behind the scenes. Once this came to light, the company got rid of the humans and immediately unleashed a flood of misinformation spread by algorithms that couldn’t distinguish fact from fiction.
Shortly thereafter, in an effort to promote its video platform, the company began putting money in the pockets of publishers to motivate them to create video content, marking the beginning of the digital news industry’s great “pivot to video” era. They then discontinued that plan, and all the money deposited by the publishers eventually ran out and they ceased operations.
This doesn’t even begin to touch on all the publishers who found a huge audience on Facebook, only to have it vanish entirely as a result of an unannounced and unexplained change in the algorithm that deprived them of prioritization, or the enormous amount of misinformation and propaganda that has gone wild on the platform in the post-fact-checking era.
But surely the problem will be solved by simply putting the information in the chatbot’s black box for sorting. And there’s no way publishers should regret having their information collected in real time, just as Google’s AI overview didn’t provide a clear example of how that type of content drives click-throughs to the site so people actually read the article. This will be the time when the meta finally settles the news. Or kills. What’s the difference really?
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