It's true that there are lots of low-quality opinions too, but there is more than enough high-quality opinionated content to fill your day reading. There's no reason to read "breaking news". If something's important, a weekly publication will soon enough have something thoughtful to say about it.
Yea, they get most of their money from ads and also subscriptions so they need to produce a great volume of content to get the most return, but that also sets the bar very low if that's now acceptable "journalism". Compared to what used to be written in newspapers, the average content we are getting now is (subjectively) much worse overall. Rather than numerous well-written text articles with a few ads and one opinion section, most online news websites look like the reverse of that nowadays.
But you know what you're getting into with these pieces -- they largely exist as an outlet for opinion pieces. What I have a problem with are outlets like the NYTimes which blur the line between opinion and news.
I don't have a horse in this race, since I quit Facebook, but I'd rather see Facebook do its unavoidable filtering in a way that is aware of relationships but blind to content; you see more posts from individuals and groups that you give evidence of caring about, without regard for what they say.
Indeed, FB should probably tread lightly in the gray area. But don't let the existence of a gray area confound attempts to deal with the giant, growing, cancerous, black mass.
This content is part of the worst filter bubble of all time. You and I don't see it, because this content is not merely targeted towards the "highly suggestible" demographic, but carefully targeted away from the "might publicly object or be able to do something to stop it" demographic, which most HN readers are in. That anti-targeting allows showing much more scurrilous content than could ever be shown on TV.
Something like "ABCnews.com.co" is A) impersonating ABC and B) publishing objectively-false stories. If Facebook wants to put a warning next to it, or drop its share priority, or only accept shares with comments attached, I don't give a damn. That's not an entry into a partisan fight, it's the news equivalent of flagging a spam link.
I have lots of Facebook friends who sometimes share dubious or ill-sourced stories, and I wish they wouldn't. But I have a few Facebook friends in a very different group, who post whole-cloth inventions at the level of the dumbest conspiracies, or take Onion and Duffleblog articles as real news. It's a fundamentally different phenomenon.
I think until recently the algorithm making the decision has had a peculiar bias. It's had a bias for "engagement" and the most engaging content is often the most outrageous / incendiary / clickbaity.
So if Facebook doesn't "choose what's good for you", a default decision was already made: they'll show you what's engaging. But I think it's important to appreciate that default is still biased. It's just biased in a strange way that could have negative political consequences.
This is the same sort of "say it enough and it becomes true" crap that Zuckerberg is peddling.
Of course I can't blame them, because the industry's economic reality is that a certain number of articles must be published every day, and opinions are just much more plentiful and easier to source than breaking news.
Yet the broader reality is that Facebook has no obligation to society at large to deliver these opinion pieces to the masses. In fact by doing so, Facebook (and the internet more broadly) contributes to social unrest and polarization by constantly feeding people opinions that reinforce their own.
Facebook should be reducing the visibility of such content on its network.
Certainly high quality opinions exist, and they do have value. And intellectual content usually holds at least some kernel if opinion. But the problem is the pile-on, the crowd-fury, the group-think that always seems to accompany and eventually overpower those few reasoned opinions that exist.
The root problem is the avalanche of opinions that assaults our rationality whenever anything happens in the world. We need to slow things down to reduce the group-think, to give people room to breathe and the reasoned opinions to be heard and not shouted down.
Hence my belief that Facebook should reduce its bandwidth for opinion ("news").