facebook_logo.pngIn Sunday’s New York Times, Ravi Somaiya offers the latest in a long string of stories about how Facebook is changing how people get the news.

The story opens with the usual invocation about how people don’t visit home pages any more but are instead visiting single pages. While this has been true since the advent of RSS and other technologies of the early social web it’s den more true when Facebook, Twitter and other social networks are considered.

RSS in particular was – and is – a dumb technology. It tells you exactly what to do and when to do it. Even Twitter follows a similar model, at least until it decides to implement some sort of algorithm-based feed. But Facebook is always there acting as a gatekeeper, using thousands of behind-the-scenes calculations to decide for you what you will think is important.

In Somaiya’s story, though, Facebook engineer Greg Marra offers up this quote to show a complete lack of self-awareness:

“We try to explicitly view ourselves as not editors,” he said. “We don’t want to have editorial judgment over the content that’s in your feed. You’ve made your friends, you’ve connected to the pages that you want to connect to and you’re the best decider for the things that you care about.”

The key word, I think, in that quote is “editorial” and it’s there that the entire concept of what Facebook is doing and what role it plays in the media equation hinges.

In Facebook’s world they’ve off-loaded the role of “editor,” someone who makes decisions as to what does and doesn’t get seen by the mass of people, to the News Feed algorithm. That way they get to continue to say that publishers should just publish good content and it will get to the people who want it without having to do anything to back that statement up.

“Editorial” implies value judgements and while they say they don’t want to do that, the assertion is invalidated by how they set the standards for the content that’s shared. A certain type of headline will perform well until they decide it’s become too pervasive, at which point they make a change to penalize it in the feed. So you go from “….And You Won’t Believe What Happens Next” to “Five Things You Missed In…” to incredibly condescending troll-ish headlines. And that doesn’t even get into how these networks employ teams of people to take down what’s deemed to be offensive, something that’s clearly an editorial decision.

And just like every other editor, the Facebook team’s decisions are being made based on what will benefit them most. Not to get all Old Testament, but engagement begets engagement, which begets ad revenue.

(Later Update: Jay Rosen destroys the idea that Facebook is some sort of impassive and impartial facilitator of news delivery in ways I could only dream of.)

So when, in David Carr’s accompanying NYT piece about Facebook and mobile publishing, Facebook says it may encourage publishers to build reading experiences that are solely within Facebook, publishers should take it as their cue to double-down on Google+. While Facebook says it’s all about optimizing load times and such by keeping all that data on its own servers, but what it’s actually talking about is owning the entire reader experience.

But at this point what can publishers realistically do?

Abandoning Facebook may not be a realistic solution. Too much traffic would be instantly lost and, because not everyone would do likewise, that ground would largely be ceded to a competitor. But they can do more to encourage use of those “dumb” technologies. Go back to writing for SEO, Show people how to use RSS. Do more to support the content agnostic platforms that treat everything that comes in equally, or at least isn’t so easily manipulated.

At this point Facebook is dangerous, arrogant and naive, a combination that spells trouble for publishers. The social network has been playing an extended game of “rope a dope” with the media industry for years now, And there’s almost no way out of it until a challenger comes along to know Facebook from its perch.

But there is something we as the readers can do: Switch over to “Most Recent.” See everything. Discover posts you may not have otherwise seen. And demand Facebook offer that as a perpetual option, not a decision you have to remember to make every morning. Either that or get outside the Facebook ecosystem entirely and discover new ways to get the news. Only these sorts of steps will do anything to hold the Facebook gatekeepers accountable for the decisions they’re making on your behalf, decisions based on data that could be inaccurate at best or massively off-base and potentially dangerous at worst. There’s no other system in place to get them to pay attention to how their actions are impacting the world outside of their own network.