Last week, Facebook introduced the option of assigning what is known as a Legacy Contact for European users. What this means for the user is that there is now an option to assign the digital equivalent of an executor to your profile: someone to manage it after you have died.
After providing proof of death and having your account memorialised i.e. frozen in time, this individual can change your profile picture, add new friends and pin a post to your page with details of e.g. a memorial service in your honour.
Facebook has arrived at the provision of this option following what is essentially a series of queries, requests and even court cases pursuing access to the account (and data) of a deceased individual on the part of their next of kin.
Before memorialisation was introduced, if you were not 'friends' with the deceased individual on Facebook you could not see any of the person's posts, pictures, videos - all the memories that a parent or spouse would desire access to but would have been denied if they weren't Facebook users. Had they tried to log into the deceased's account they were automatically violating Facebook's Terms of Service and were locked out.
The first case where this happened was in 2005 when 22-year-old Nebraskan Loren Williams died in a motorcycle accident prompting his mother Karen to gain access to his Facebook account in order to retrieve pictures and other posts. Upon emailing Facebook in order to ask permission to log into Loren’s account she was locked out. She subsequently sued for access, the first of several cases that lead to the creation of the memorialised account. I’ve written more about this issue in a recent Irish Times article.
Facebook: not just the digital equivalent of a shoebox full of photographs
What the above case illustrates is that Facebook is not merely a free, online equivalent to a shoebox full of memories. It is also a service supplied by a company that hosts your personal data and provides access to that data based on compliance with its terms of service. The same goes for any other cloud service, email provider or social media offering.
I was thinking about these precious memories (wedding photos, video of baby's first steps, etc.) in terms of what they translate to on Facebook: data and access to this data. Then I started thinking about it from the perspective of a media organisation that has a Facebook page or group where their content is hosted and perhaps more significantly, where much of the audience interactions occur.
Whose audience?
How much control does the media organisation of the future have over its content and audience when it goes down the avenue of hosting on Facebook?
This question is more relevant in 2015 since the social networking platform introduced Instant Articles, “a tool for publishers to create fast, interactive articles on Facebook and was designed to give them control over their stories, brand experience and monetization opportunities,” according to Michael Reckhow, Product Manager for Facebook.
What it really means is that instead of clicking through from a media org’s Facebook page to their website to read an article previewed on Facebook, the reader never haves to leave the social networking site and the publisher never gets the clicks on their home page. Facebook, a third party platform, gains control of a) the content (both in terms of hosting it in its entirety and how it gets positioned according to the Newsfeed algorithm) b) the audience and c) the monetisation.
Clearly, it is not a wise decision to bypass such social media platforms in an attempt to keep your audience: according to a recent research by the American Press Institute, 88 percent of ‘Millennials’ (aged 18-34) get their news from Facebook on a regular basis while over 50 percent do so on a daily basis.
Here in Ireland, we see a similar picture. Our Digital News Ireland 2015 report, carried out in association with the Reuters Institute, found that Facebook played a significant role as a source of news for the Irish consumer: it is used as a news source for 46 percent of the population, which is above the international average. Perhaps this is because the Irish like to share and comment on online news via social media at a higher rate (at 29 percent and 25 percent respectively) than many other countries.
When asked about accountability in light of its importance to the news ecosystem, Andy Mitchell, director of news and media partnerships at Facebook, said (at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy, earlier this year) that the social network should not be the primary source of news for anyone.
The response, as Jay Rosen paraphrases it, is: “Facebook should not be anyone’s primary news source or experience. It should be a supplement to seeking out news yourself with direct suppliers.” Rosen goes on to point out that Facebook, while saying this, appears to be gunning for audience retention, especially on mobile. There’s nothing wrong with a little competition but there is something a little worrying about an online walled garden where the user never has to leave and may not even know that there is anything outside this utopia of flickering images and never-ending updates.
How does the modern media organisation adapt to such an ecosystem?
“The next thing is whether or not the news industry invests in its own future, or lets the tech industry continue to own it,” says tech entrepreneur and writer, Dave Winer, in a post containing his thoughts on Instant Articles (incidentally, Winer is known as the father of blogging so he knows a thing or two about technology and the publishing industry).
I think I’ll end this reflection with more observations from Winer in his post on 'How to Reboot Journalism': “Feed your headlines and stories into Facebook and Twitter, you have to do that -- they exist and billions of people use them -- but also into new systems for news distribution. There is room for lots of different approaches. We're at the beginning of something new, at a time of exciting possibilities. Let that excitement be reflected in your thinking.”
And so it is the responsibility of institutes like FuJo to go out there and develop these new distribution models and platforms, making news open and accessible rather than giving up control to the tech industry.
