How Washington Should Regulate Facebook
...For Facebook—the largest online advertising company after Google—legitimate news publishers also can be understood as edge providers. Indeed, Facebook has become the world’s most popular source of news. Facebook is making life miserable for legitimate news publishers in three principle ways.
First, Facebook’s algorithm rewards click-worthy stories by moving them to the top of users’ news feed. Because fake news stories are designed to be click-worthy, and because Facebook’s business model is about driving page views and advertising, it follows that fake news is featured prominently in Facebook’s news feed. And when news publishers put content behind a subscription pay-wall, Facebook tends to bury them because, over time, they attract fewer clicks as readers favor “free news,” apparently indifferent to its quality....MORE
Second, as reported by Hubbard, through its Instant Articles program, Facebook degrades the download speeds of news publishers that refuse to port content to Facebook’s website. News publishers care about download speeds because users are quick to abandon a story that takes too long to download. News publishers can avoid this degradation by complying with Facebook’s porting requirement, but at a cost of losing clicks (that would have occurred on their own sites) and thus advertising dollars....
And Sally Hubbard's Forbes piece:
Why Fake News Is An Antitrust Problem
