It's a problem that Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube could solve essentially overnight, if there was any motivation for them to do it. They are the media companies of our day, and they have the capital to hire local reporters in the 500-1000 largest metro areas in the us.
I feel like that's a very naive way to look at it.
Lots of entities have enough capital to get a news company going, the problem is profitability and long-term sustainability. Not to mention running an actual news agency. Just because a company is profitable in one area doesn't mean they're guaranteed success in another.
How are companies like Facebook supposed to solve this problem? Where is the money to pay for these journalists going to come from? The ad revenue generated by that wing of their company? If it was that easy, then existing media companies wouldn't be struggling.
If you're counting on there being synergy between their existing userbase then I don't think it's worth it because there's so many risks. If a company starts pushing a certain type of news, their credibility and their brand would be so closely tied together with their news branch that either the news would be very bland and have a n agenda while also potentially alienating a large portion of users. This could very well lead to killing their main product.
Companies like google are already under fire for being partial. Add in them actively writing about things like politics and it'd be like adding a barrel of oil.
Not to mention the anti-trust laws involved. Companies like the ones you mentioned are already overpowered let alone giving them the keys to present actual news.
To be clear, my suggestion was that they should put boots on the ground, not that they should employ bots or ml. There are journalists looking for work and there are media companies with more money than they know what to do with. Facebook could hire local journalists.
I know they won't, because they don't care about the quality of content on their platform. But there's no reason they couldn't hire actual journalists to do actual reporting for their platform, except that nobody is demanding it of them.
Of course they could. But if they did hire local journalists all over the country, those journalists would have a strong incentive to produce content that drives maximal "engagement" on facebook's platform. That's just a recipe for even more clickbait and outrage-driven reporting. No thanks.
