Bezos is right; Zuckerberg is wrong

By: Beatrice E. Rangel - 15/01/2025

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As social and antisocial networks absorb the minds of the new generations like a hungry octopus, traditional media see their audiences dwindle without seeming to find formulas to join the distribution channels of the 21st century. For this reason, information entrepreneurs try to launch new strategies to capture markets more efficiently and in line with the feelings of the rising generation X and Millennials.

Evidence of this search for new markets has been given by Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, owners of Amazon and the Washington Post, and Meta, the company that counts Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Threads among its assets. Both modified the information policies of their companies at the end of 2024 and the beginning of 20205.

Bezos has scrapped the Washington Post's traditional policy of endorsing a candidate in the US presidential race. The decision, which was highly criticised by the progressive world in the United States, is nevertheless entirely rational. Because, as Bezos has made clear, one of the reasons why traditional media have lost credibility and, with it, audiences, is the liberal or conservative biases that they have given to the news. Gone are the days when American journalism was obsessed with impartiality. Walter Cronkite and before him Walter Lippmann and Ernest Hemingway obsessed over cultivating the truth and saw journalism as the mission of making it reach all mortals. But at the end of the last century, Rupert Murdoch, a businessman with the soul of a pamphleteer, entered American journalism. He had accumulated a lot of money by creating, acquiring and managing tabloid newspapers in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. In the United States, he acquired The New York Post and the Wall Street Journal, as well as the FOX television network. FOX began the path of biased news projection with the sole purpose of capturing the less educated segment of the American television audience. The most exotic conspiracy theories were introduced on its screens and newspaper pages and figures who supported polarization and rejection of debate were projected. Fox forced the other networks to take contrary positions in order to protect their audiences. The distortion of the truth reached its peak when FOX had to pay an out-of-court settlement of eight hundred million dollars to an electoral process management company that sued it for defamation and was about to win the lawsuit. After three decades we are witnessing a total polarization of the American media and with it an abrupt fall in the credibility and loyalty of the public towards traditional media. Bezos' decision is a watershed for traditional media since within the spirit of healthy competition that prevails in the United States, the Washington Post's turn towards impartiality will be emulated by the rest of the media.

Mark Zuckerberg, on the other hand, decided to take the wrong path. By rescinding META's policy of checking information transmitted via Facebook, Instagram and the rest of its networks to verify its veracity, the creator of Facebook is indicating to us that he is going to take the path of Rupert Murdoch, whereby the truth is twisted to accommodate political preferences. And exploit the lack of discernment of less educated people. In addition, the decision will harm Meta users in the first instance because the fact-checking program worked well to prevent false content and conspiracy theories from going viral. Thanks to this, Meta has managed to win back an audience that was already beginning to disconnect from Meta's networks. If those users decide to look for other digital destinations, Meta will begin to experience a significant decrease in its income. And just as the Murdoch empire begins to collapse, Meta will suffer the same rejection from a younger audience more accustomed to checking information from several sources. And while it is true that the fact-checking program was used disproportionately in the Republican Party sphere, the solution to this problem lay in increasing the review of content emanating from the Democratic Party, not by cutting off the system. In the medium term, the suspension of the content verification program could reduce Meta's market in a similar way to how Twitter's market shrank when Elon Musk decided to take the reins of the network.

«The opinions published herein are the sole responsibility of its author».