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What Social Media Needs to Learn from Traditional Media


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The era of social media companies presenting themselves as passive conduits for user speech is coming to an end. The question is what will replace it.

Social media has become a dominant forum for discourse and news distribution. The leaders of social media companies insist that they are not publishers, but merely technological conduits for user-generated content. And yet, at the same time, they proudly advertise the critical role they play in modern communication and access to information.

The decisions they make about what material should be seen and by whom have a greater impact than anything The Los Angeles Times could ever have dreamed of. But the social media industry has yet to articulate a philosophy of how the pursuit of advertising revenue should be balanced against other social values.

From Wired
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