Ben Thompson:

This, then, is the deep irony of this controversy: Facebook is receiving a huge amount of criticism for allegedly biasing the news via the empowerment of a team of human curators to make editorial decisions, as opposed to relying on what was previously thought to be an algorithm; it is an algorithm, though — the algorithm that powers the News Feed, with the goal of driving engagement — that is arguably doing more damage to our politics than the most biased human editor ever could.

The fact of the matter is that, on the part of Facebook people actually see — the News Feed, not Trending News — conservatives see conservative stories, and liberals see liberal ones; the middle of the road is as hard to find as a viable business model for journalism (these things are not disconnected).

There are a lot of sides here. Does Facebook have the right to publish news as they see fit? Certainly.

But the central issue is the slow erosion of the traditional journalism model. We traditionally have limits on ownership of news outlets. Limits on the number of newspapers, radio stations, and TV outlets a single entity is allowed to own.

Facebook, Google and, to a much smaller extent, Apple, are testing those limits in a completely new way. In my opinion, the real danger occurs not in Facebook’s approach to news, but in giving any single entity the ability to control too great a slice of it.