How Facebook plans to become one of the most powerful tools in politics

There's one reason above all that I find this article incredibly chilling: It was published November 26, 2014. Prior to the 2016 election.

"Last week, The Awl's John Herrman noted that growth as he raised an important consideration for Facebook advertisers: the growth of sites creating specifically political content, putting more emphasis on virality than accuracy. It's worth quoting at length.

In the context of a customized feed, where each story is algorithmically selected based on the likelihood that you will engage with it, content-marketed identity media speaks louder and more clearly than content-marketed journalism, which is handicapped by everything that ostensibly makes it journalistic—tone, notions of fairness, purported allegiance to facts and context over conclusions. These posts are not so much stories as sets of political premises stripped of context and asserted via Facebook share—they scan like analysis but contain only conclusions; after the headline, they never argue, only reveal.

Most of what is shared is messy and outside of the control of publishers, both media and advertisers. In Herrman's words, "The thing that grabs your attention and holds it the longest, that is most likely to be shared again, is the thing that wins the next slot in the endless algorithmic draw." Facebook is a particularly polarized place, meaning that political stories often bounce around quickly -- good and bad, true and false -- and less scrupulous publishers (both media and advertisers) can tap into that."