Saving the news biz from Google, Facebook

NEW YORK : With 2.7 billion users around the world, if Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s most populous. With a user spending an average of 58 minutes a day on Facebook, the amount of time spent on the site adds up to 326 million eight-hour days globally, only slightly less than the entire American population of 329 million.

With reach comes power and, inevitably, responsibility. While Facebook says it has its own code of conduct (which it does) and its own policies for regulating content (which too it does, though how it implements those has been debatable), its mission statement—about moving fast, being bold, and empowering people—conceals the grip it has on what people talk about, where they go on the internet and what they buy.