Author: Ben Sisario / Source: New York Times
News publishers have long had a fraught relationship with Facebook. But tensions have become more public in recent weeks, with news organizations openly criticizing the tech giant for new policies that they say are harmful to journalism.
The most recent salvo came on Thursday, when Mark Thompson, the chief executive of The New York Times Company, accused Facebook of unintentionally “supporting the enemies of quality journalism” by using algorithms that can mischaracterize news as partisan political content.
Mr. Thompson was speaking at a panel discussion in New York, which also included Campbell Brown, Facebook’s head of global news partnerships. Ms. Brown defended a policy Facebook recently introduced in response to criticism over how its ad network was able to be manipulated during elections.
Ms. Brown cited the importance of safeguarding elections and said the problems with political ads were “something we are deeply concerned about. We hear you.”
In criticizing Facebook, Mr. Thompson showed two advertisements that The Times had recently purchased on the platform. Both had been flagged as political.
One ad promoted a news article about President Trump’s summit with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader.
By calling it political content, Mr. Thompson said, Facebook was blurring the line between reporting on politics and politics itself. The other ad was a promotion for The Times’s NYT Cooking site, with manicured image of a pistachio rose water cake. There was no indication why that had been labeled political content by the algorithm.Tensions between Facebook and publishers have been building since at least January, when the social network changed its News Feed algorithm in a way that demoted content from publishers in favor of posts from a user’s friends.
Executives like Robert Thomson, the News…
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