According to a poll from Pew last year, about half of us are getting our news solely from Facebook these days. Instead of reading a newspaper, watching the nightly news or visiting a news site online, we’ll trust that if something’s worth knowing it’ll land on our walls.
Consider: The average visit to The New York Times website lasted just 4.6 minutes—the longest of the top 25 news organizations. The average time most of us spend on Facebook: approximately 42 minutes a day. In fact, we spent so much time on Facebook that it accounts for one out of every five minutes we waste on our phones.
Although a few prominent news sites—Vox and the Times among them—have cut deals with Facebook to have the social media network publish some of their stuff directly, Facebook also constantly tinkers with the criteria it uses to determine what users see in their feeds, as well as the fact it currently gives much more weight to stories published by friends instead of news organizations.
“Which means, increasingly, Facebook is America’s news editor,” writes Adrienne LaFrance of The Atlantic. “Only it’s an editor with a vague and amorphous set of values—news judgment that is tailored to every reader’s own behavior and likes.” That potentially means that if a user doesn’t like politics, he or she might not know who the next president is at election time unless someone posts it on his or her wall. (The Atlantic)