Wired’s going behind a metered paywall: Great long-form reporting like this, on a turbulent two years for Facebook, make a strong case for paying for quality content.

Takeaways:

• Facebook wants to be a platform that doesn’t bear responsibility for the content it carries rather than a publisher. Under pressure from advertisers, legislators and Silicon Valley campaigners it’s beginning to realise it’s both.
• Publishers are fed up with Facebook’s domination of the advertising market on the back of their expensive editorial. Rupert Murdoch has argued Facebook pay carriage fees for content; BuzzFeed’s CEO Jonah Peretti appears to agree.
• And yet news makes up only a small percentage of Facebook’s content. Facebook could pivot away from being “the perfect personalised newspaper” (M. Zuckerberg, 2014) and return to cat-posting, which makes its users a great deal happier anyway.