I think it's pretty obvious considering how shallow and frequent the reporting is that this isn't traditional media criticism. There are real issues with Facebook that are not new but they have nothing to do with "creepy patents" or Facebook giving data to Chinese phone makers. (Who, you know, make the phone.) The NYT subjects no other corporation to this sort of scrutiny. In fact it's difficult to the recall any anti-"specific firm" editorials from the Times this year compared to the 4-5 anti-Facebook editorials. All of this suggests that the NYT is waging a campaign and targeting Facebook and it would be good to know why.
I personally assume that all news outlets are biased one way or another. And I do not believe there's a news outlet anywhere which is totally fair, unbiased and objective.
It seems reasonable to guess that the NYT's leadership believes FB is extremely influential in US politics and that it is imperative that FB avoid facilitating another 2016-style presidential campaign. In addition, most of the NYT's readership almost certainly believes that FB helped unfairly swing the election to Trump through illegal Russian funded ads and so forth, and it's good for business for a paper to cater to that readership.
Interestingly, The NY Times is also extremely influential in US politics, so it does seem that reducing Facebook’s influence has a benefit to The NY Times. Anyone have any data on the tracking that The NY Times website uses? Just curious if there is any hypocrisy or conflicts of interest. Most news orgs seem to aggressively track.
