[bduerst]

Have you heard of the Sinclair group?

> The company is the largest television station operator in the United States by number of stations, and largest by total coverage; owning or operating a total of 193 stations across the country in over 100 markets (covering 40% of American households)...

> Sinclair's stations have been known for featuring news content and programming that promote conservative political positions, and have been involved in various controversies surrounding politically-motivated programming decisions

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Broadcast_Group#Polit...

[drhayes9]

I have, but I think Facebook, as a media company, is what Sinclair can only wish it was. It's a media company that has real-time measurements of what people are engaging with, who they are demographically, and can respond minute-by-minute with adjustments of what kind of "coverage" they provide (for Facebook, this is adjustments to the algorithms that make stories show up in users' timelines).

I think we, as users, bear a lot of responsibility for the content we create and if there's a lot of awful stuff out there... well, we created it. But I think someone deciding to make a bunch of money in concentrating and distributing that awfulness deserves a lot of scrutiny.

[bduerst]

Not quite. I think for it to be a more apt comparison, Facebook would need to be pushing a narrative to it's most popular users to promote on their channels, the same way that Sinclair group does:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWLjYJ4BzvI

I don't think there's evidence of that right now with Facebook.