Blame the algorithms — or the users.
If you spend any significant amount of time on Twitter and Facebook, you've probably come to the same conclusion that many are reaching over the past week: Twitter has been dominated by relentless, riveting, in-depth, second-by-second coverage of the Ferguson protests and police clash, documenting the year's most important domestic news story, while Facebook has largely been dominated by life events, viral news, and buckets full of ice water.
And that's fine! Or at least it would be, if it weren't for Facebook's consistent efforts to compete with Twitter and be considered the internet's primary destination for social news.
Over the past few years, even casual observers have watched as Twitter and Facebook's services have borrowed design and platform features from each other, making them look, in some instances, almost like the same service. Take Twitter's recently re-designed profiles from this past April:
Last January Facebook aped Twitter's trending topics as well in order "to surface interesting and relevant conversations in order to help you discover the best content from all across Facebook." The social network also hired the Wall Street Journal's Liz Heron to help Facebook form partnerships with media companies and journalists. Just weeks later, Facebook launched FB Newswire, powered by the social content discovery platform, Storyful. Per the Facebook blog post:
News is finding a bigger audience on Facebook than ever before. Journalists and media organizations have become an integral part of Facebook, which is visible in features like Trending Topics, improvements to Pages, and recent changes to News Feed.
But despite these very public efforts, Facebook has largely failed to reflect the centrality of Michael Brown murder, Ferguson protests, and police backlash to the American news conversation, or to reflect the importance conferred on the story by both Twitter and editors of publications of all sorts. Facebook's algorithmically controlled News Feed and Trending Topics have, in certain cases, been behind on Ferguson news (a Trending Topic last night while protestors and journalists were being tear gassed, noted that protests were "relatively peaceful") and often ignored Ferguson altogether. In an informal poll of BuzzFeed's editorial staff, out of 38 accounts, Ferguson only appeared in Facebook's Trending Topics 21 times (often well below NFL preseason, Taylor Swift, and ASAP Ferg news).
For many, there's also a lack of relevant Ferguson coverage in News Feed. One colleague's Facebook friend — who does not work in media — was so frustrated by the lack of Ferguson news that she created a fake life event saying she was married in order to post her thoughts about the protests. It worked. The fake marriage announcement (which is heavily weighted by Facebook) has stayed near the top of my colleague's feed for some time.
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