After a one-week hiatus for a Valentine’s special last week, I return with the tenth edition of our “Around the Web” series. In response to Australia’s plans to enact legislation requiring certain big tech companies to pay Australian news agencies for disseminating content, Facebook abruptly picked up its ball and proverbially went home. Facebook shut down pages of Australian news sites and Government entities and prevented their content from being shared via Facebook by anyone around the world. For today’s post, I will discuss the problems with relying on Facebook or any other big tech giant as a primary medium for news and information consumption. After identifying serious problems that arise from relying on Facebook as a primary news source – I suggest RSS as the best alternative to Facebook for empowering active consumers of news and information.
Facebook Bans Australian News
This Around the Web piece is not focusing on Australia’s proposed legislation and the debate over whether it is a good law. However, I will provide a very summary overview of the events that led to Facebook’s draconian measures.
Several months ago, Australia moved to amend its laws to require Google and Facebook to pay news publishers for their content. Google and Facebook were displeased, and the New York Post reported in September that Facebook threatened to prevent users from sharing Australian news content if the proposed legislation became law.
On February 17, 2021, Facebook followed through on its threat when the prospect of the legislation becoming law became imminent.
Article Recommendation – On Facebook’s Ban
Below, I will recommend one article relating to Facebook’s banning Australian news sharing from its platform.
Associated Press: “Facebook makes a power move in Australia – and may regret it”
By Barbara Ortutay and Tali Arbel. February 19, 2021.
The Associated Press published this article about the after-effects of Facebook’s decision two days after the ban took effect. The article explains the effect of the ban in practical terms: “Facebook’s move means people in Australia can no longer post links to news stories on Facebook.” Facebook initially also applied the ban to Australian government emergency pages, but reversed that aspect of the ban on the nineteenth.
Two passages from the Associated Press article caught my attention. Firstly:
Billions of people around the world rely on Facebook for essential information – not just news, but charity and government pages, emergency announcements, and other important channels. Facebook’s news blackout swept up many of these…
Secondly:
The ban affected articles from large international news organization[s] and small community newspapers or radio stations alike. Those restrictions potentially deprived many Australians of basic information on Facebook about COVID-19 or the country’s fire season…
While I would quibble with the Associated Press’s assertion that billions of people rely on Facebook for news and essential information, it is no doubt true that many people do. Setting aside the fact that Facebook pulled the rug from under a relatively small number of Facebook users in Australia, the idea of relying on Facebook as portal to news and essential information is concerning.
Relying on Facebook for News and Information is Folly
On January 27, 2021, a gentleman by the name of Roman Kumar wrote a provocatively titled piece called “WhatsApp and the domestication of users.” His piece was prompted by the Facebook-owned messaging app, WhatsApp, changing its privacy and data collection policies for the worse. He observed, correctly, that many dissatisfied users would remain with WhatsApp because leaving would mean “losing the ability to communicate with WhatsApp users.”
Mr. Kumar’s thoughts on the domestication of users of big tech platforms are mostly on point, and I may discuss them in a future post. For now, I cite to his article for a different reason – his use of the term “domestication.”
Who is Facebook’s user? Is it you, your relative, or your friend with a Facebook profile? Or is it the advertiser who uses the information you provide to sell products to you and other’s? What is Facebook’s product? Facebook’s product is information about its “users,” which it then sells to advertisers. Here too, the term “domestication” is apt, albeit in a slightly different context than Mr. Kumar used it in his post.
The ostensible user is not fully in control on Facebook. Facebook designs its site to keep “users” on the platform as long as possible. For one, this allows Facebook to extract more information about “users.” For two, this allows Facebook to pitch having more readers to advertisers. To be sure, just about every site wants to attract users and have them spend time on the site – we are no exception here. But if one is using a platform as a portal to the external world, one should consider that platform’s values, objectives, and purposes.
The Infamous Algorithms
Unlike more privacy- and freedom-oriented platforms, Facebook does not allow users to view content in an un-curated manner, otherwise known as what a particular user may want to see. Facebook deploys its closed algorithms to present to users what Facebook wants them to see. What is Facebook’s objective in deciding what shows up on someone’s news-feed and why? Only Facebook knows. But the effect of Facebook’s design on users who use the platform as a portal to the outside world is clear – Facebook filters the news by featuring certain news and blocking other news. In other words, Facebook for its own purposes or the purposes of its government and corporate stakeholders decides both who has a platform and who does not and what news every user receives. It may change its policies, insofar as anyone can discern its policies, without being transparent with its supposed users.
Take-Away
This section is not intended to address people who use Facebook and happen to see and sometimes read news and commentary on Facebook, but rather the people described by the Associated Press who use Facebook as their primary medium to learn about important, indeed critical, matters. Facebook attempts to shepherd users to its own ends. In the end, using Facebook as a portal to the world is to be used by Facebook.
Second Article Recommendation on Facebook Alternatives
In the aftermath of Facebook’s Australia ban, The Guardian published a piece recommending newsfeed alternatives to Facebook.
The Guardian: “If you’re in Australia and Facebook has eaten your newsfeed, where do you go now?”
By Natasha May and Rafqa Touma. February 20, 2021.
I ordinarily recommend articles because I think that they are interesting. In this case, I have some issues with the premise of The Guardian’s Facebook alternative review.
Because this article is about news, I will focus primarily on The Guardian’s alternative newsfeed recommendations.
Pure Newsfeed Recommendations
The Guardian’s recommendation of Twitter as an alternative to Facebook newsfeeds for Australians misses the point. Losing access to news on Facebook should be an opportunity to consider different, better ways of accessing news. Twitter may well be worse than Facebook, and the ideological biases of its leadership are arguably more extreme than Facebook’s. Twitter, like Facebook, views its users as products and guinea pigs. While one may follow individual interesting commentators on Twitter, or use it for real-time updates on certain foreign events, it is not a healthy news portal in a broad sense.
The Guardian recommends Flipboard. I used Flipboard briefly months ago when I looked at it as a way for sharing our content. The Guardian describes it as “curat[ing] a few of news stories” based on interests that you identify. That sounds accurate enough. Flipboard is better than Facebook and Twitter, and it performs similarly in some respects to dedicated RSS readers. However, it is an inferior option to having full control of your content with a dedicated RSS reader.
Community and Newsfeed Recommendations
There are three additional newsfeed recommendations from The Guardian. To start, it recommended Reddit. Reddit may have individual forum communities of interest on particular issues (or investing, apparently), but it is hardly a central news portal.
Next, it recommends MeWe, which I have discussed before. It is a privacy-friendly and less censorious alternative to Facebook. Furthermore, it does not deign to “curate” users’ newsfeeds. These merits noted, MeWe is a platform for communities without many communities, and there is little value there for someone who does not join with his or her friends and family. I will add, as a broader issue, that any sort centralized and proprietary Facebook alternative may ultimately develop the same issues as Facebook, or be shut down by colluding competitors.
Finally, The Guardian recommends Tumblr. I have nothing to add there.
RSS as a Facebook Newsfeed Alternative
The true alternative to relying on a centralized newsfeed run by any entity – for profit or otherwise – which may or may not share your sensibilities and which most definitely does not share your objectives or interests is to take control of your own information universe. Why have Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey “curate” your feed when you can curate your own? The solution, hiding in plain sight, is the RSS feed.
“RSS,” which stands for “Really Simple Syndication,” is an XML web feed. While XML is not too readily readable on its own, a feed reader parses the XML and presents it in a readable way. If a website has an RSS feed, one can copy the feed into a feed reader and find new content from the site in your reader. RSS feeds update automatically, obviating the need for the user to affirmatively check the website attached to the feed to see if there have been updates.
RSS feeds were more popular about a decade ago, when even Facebook and Twitter offered them. Then, in 2013, Google axed Google Reader, which was the most popular RSS reader, and more and more sites began to eschew offering RSS at all. RSS fell by the wayside, or was shoved to the wayside, as people turned to social media to deliver prepackaged news to them. RSS requires agency – the user affirmatively choose which feeds to subscribe to and copies those feeds into a reader. If the user decides that he or she does not want to follow a feed anymore, he or she need only remove it from the feed list. Some commercial feed readers recommend feeds based on a user’s interests, but the user opts whether to subscribe to or decline the recommended feed.
RSS Content Recommendations From Around the Web
Below, I will recommend some content and resources related to RSS feeds and feed readers. I encourage you to consider curating your own RSS feed to use as your primary news and information portal.
Choose Your RSS Feed Reader
There are three types of RSS feed readers.
Online Feed Readers
Online feed readers store your feeds online. Most of the popular online feed readers offer a limited free plan and premium options. I do not use an online feed reader, so I cannot attest to the merits or demerits of the popular ones. The three that seem to come up most often are Feedly, Inoreader, NewsBlur, and Feedbin. Each touts different advanced features for the premium versions and has different pricing plans. The latter two, NewsBlur and Feedbin, are open source.
When considering an online feed reader, one should look at pricing, features, privacy policy, and compatibility with your particular device(s).
Desktop Feed Readers
Desktop-based feed readers do not sync your data across devices, unless the reader is a client for an online or self-hosted feed reader. However, you can download all of your files from a desktop-based feed reader and then upload them into a different reader, whether on the same device or a different one. I use Akregator on my desktop, a powerful feed reader for Linux computers. QuiteRSS, which I referenced in my Pixelfed atom feed post, is a nice, clean cross-platform option. There are many other desktop and mobile clients available. RSSOwl is another cross-platform option, albeit with a dated UI.
Some email clients also have RSS reader functions. Thunderbird, a popular email client, includes a reader, although I have never used it.
Most desktop-based readers have built-in web browsers to view web pages within the reader. The browsers for Akregator and QuiteRSS work well and each have built-in ad blocking (Akregator also has built-in tracker blocking). I would still recommend having an additional ad blocking solution – my VPN serves that purpose for me.
Self-Hosted Feed Readers
Finally, more advanced users can self-host their own RSS reader – something I am interested in doing in the future. Self-hosting gives the user full control over his or her data and allows the user to access his or her feeds on different devices. Tiny Tiny RSS, FreshRSS, and Miniflux are three options I have seen noted on several lists. These readers are compatible with different desktop and mobile clients.
The New Leaf Journal: “Follow The New Leaf Journal Pixelfed Atom Feed”
Nicholas. A. Ferrell. January 18, 2021.
In this post, I explained how to follow my combination work/personal Pixelfed account via atom feed. Atom is a format similar to RSS that is generally supported by the same feed readers. The post explains how to find an RSS or Atom feed on a website that does not feature a link to the feed on the main page (note that we make our RSS feed easy to access from the header menu).
It is worth noting that most “Federated” social media platforms support feeds. For example, you can follow my feed at Mastodon.social the same way as you can follow my Pixelfed feed – https://mastodon.social/@nafnewleafjournal.rss.
Federated social media platforms present an interesting, decentralized alternative to the U.S. big tech giants. I explained the concept of Federated social media generally in my Pixelfed review. Pixelfed, which is something of an Instagram alternative, is just one of the many interconnected federated platforms. Mastodon, the most-used of the Federated platforms, is something of a Twitter alternative, as are Plemora and the newer Misskey. Friendica aspires to be a Facebook alternative – and I understand from reading that you can actually subscribe to RSS feeds in Friendica. There are other growing Federated platforms, all of which I may cover at a later date.
Find RSS Feeds With Browser Extensions
Many sites do not offer feeds at all. Some that do nevertheless make them difficult to find, leaving no visible indication that a feed exists. Users of chromium-based and Firefox-based web browsers may find extensions designed to fetch feeds from pages that have them. I will refrain from providing recommendations here because extensions are fickle things, wont to come and go, but rest assured that they are readily available.
Create Feeds Where None Exist
At some point, every feed reader-use will encounter a site with terrific content but no feed at all. What to do? I believe that most of the premium feed readers offer the ability to create feeds for sites that do not have feeds. There are paid services that exist solely to create feeds from sites that do not have them.
I did find one very nice free feed-creation tool, courtesy of FiveFilters. It is not the most intuitive tool, but you can use FiveFilters to create feeds for many sites that do not have them. I used it to create a feed for a couple of sites, including the English-language version of the Arashi Shimbun, which led to an article here at The New Leaf Journal.
Wallabag – A Terrific Bookmarker
Where do you store the interesting articles you find via RSS or browsing the web? Some feed readers allow one to save articles from feeds. All web browsers have bookmarks. But I prefer a dedicated solution that makes it easy to organize both saved articles and articles-to-read- later.
My go-to tool is Wallabag. Wallabag allows you to save articles from your web browser into your Wallabag. Articles can be marked as already read or set to read later. It allows for articles to be designated as favorites and marked with tags for organization. Your Wallabag also has its own RSS feed, meaning you can access saved articles from your preferred reader. There are feed reader clients with direct Wallabag integration, but the one I use, Akregator, does not.
Technical users can self-host Wallabag, but for the time being, I pay about $12 per year for Wallabag’s own hosting. Wallabag is fully open source, and it keeps its servers in France and does not collect user data. It has desktop clients for all major desktop and mobile operating systems and browser extensions for major browsers. Wallabag does not offer a free plan for people using its hosting, but it does provide a 14-day trial.
Because I plan to review Wallabag in the near future, I will leave my discussion here for now.
Pocket and Instapaper are two better-known services that provide the same sort of features as Wallabag, and also have free plans. Memex is a relatively new open source alternative more geared toward research.
A Feed of Final Thoughts
More than one thing goes into being an active consumer of news and information. To be sure, one must actually attend to what he or she is reading. That means reading carefully, thinking critically, and considering the veracity, reliability, and perspective of the source. Being an active and critical consumer when reading is necessary but, in my view, not sufficient. People should consider how they come across their news and information as well.
Tools such as RSS feed readers and bookmarking applications are ways for users to be their own curators, to actively choose their own sources and authors and be the masters of their own information universes. Whatever flaws this may have as applied in a particular case, I think it is entirely preferable to outsourcing the responsibility to big tech algorithms from Facebook, Twitter, and Google News, all of which have their own ends that are at odd with the liberty of their users.
