There’s been a lot of scary, apocalyptic talk lately about Facebook’s ambitions to become not just the conduit through which news is discovered and shared, but the place where these stories live and die — a black hole in which news organizations can throw their content before Zuckerberg and his army of robot editors determine which wormholes — if any — it emerges from. Language corrupts thought, and Facebook corrupts everything.
But in imagining what this “Facebookified” media landscape would look like, there’s one outcome that — depending on how Facebook approaches it — could constitute an improvement upon the greater media landscape:
An end to plagiarism and sloppy aggregation.
For a model of how Facebook might hasten the demise of these crimes against content, consider YouTube.