Is Facebook dictating our news consumption habits?

The New York Times reported this week that Facebook will start working with news organizations to publish content directly to the social network. Among those currently in talks are Buzzfeed, National Geographic and the New York Times.

The argument here is that those few seconds it takes a person to get from Facebook to a publishing site after clicking a link are seconds wasted; keeping news consumers within their News Feeds would prevent a drop-off in engagement. Unknown still is how and if this plan will affect Facebook revenue.

The news isn’t exactly new. The late New York Times media reporter David Carr wrote about rumblings of the plan back in October.

“Yes, search from Google still creates inbound interest, and Twitter can spark attention, especially among media types,” wrote Carr, “but when it comes to sheer tonnage of eyeballs, nothing beats Facebook.”

The social network has 1.4 billion users — larger than any other social platform. Causally, publishers often credit Facebook to spikes in traffic. Just this week, barely one-year-old Vox.com announced that 40 percent of its monthly traffic comes from Facebook.

So, will Facebook’s latest plan work?

As The Atlantic pointed out, in 2011 Facebook recruited The Washington Post and The Guardian to use their Social Reader app — a native Facebook tool that would highlight the organizations’ content in News Feeds. Though it saw an initial surge in popularity, within a year of its launch the engagement level had considerably declined.

Subtle tweaks in Facebook’s algorithm have a way of significantly changing which friends’ life events and news stories appear in your News Feed. There’s no doubt that this update will, once again, change the content you’re seeing.

Perhaps, for example, you’ve noticed there’s been a spike in videos that appear in your News Feed upon log-in. In January, Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook is seeing 3 billion daily video views, but unclear is whether that’s due to Facebook users’ innate interest or the algorithm itself.

What remains is a question of chicken versus egg: is Facebook dictating how news consumers read the news, or is the data of individual Facebook users shaping the evolution of news consumption as we know it?