Does it matter if Facebook is a tech company or a media company?

Join the debate… What is your take?

The debate on whether Facebook is a media company or not is not new.

Back in 2012, before Facebook launched its initial public offering, Caroline Everson, the company’s vice president for global marketing solutions, attempted a response to WPP chief executive officer Martin Sorrell after he called Facebook — as well as Google and Twitter — media companies at the 4A’s Transformation Conference in Beverly Hills, California.

We actually define ourselves as a technology company. Media companies are known for the content that they create. Our approach has been around having open technology and really investing in the best engineering talent, the best infrastructure and providing a platform that not only users can use as their database communications vehicle, but also brands, businesses, non-profits.

The debate has re-emerged recently.

Earlier this month, chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg defined Facebook as “a platform for all ideas” during a chat with Christina Passariello at WSJDLive conference.

Facebook Leaders Call it a Tech Company, Not Media Company_LAGUNA BEACH, Calif.-Facebook Inc. is resisting the label of media company, but is getting even more heavily involved…_www.wsj.com

In September, Facebook’s vice president of product management for Newsfeed Adam Mosseri told TechCrunch Disrupt that, while they see themselves as a technology platform, “we know that we play a meaningful role in media.”

Earlier in May, the company tried to ease concerns over its trending topics by releasing for the first time its editorial guidelines, which highlight the role of human editors in the selection process.

My take: it matters how users perceive Facebook, not how others — Facebook insiders or not — define it. It is important that we, as users, understand what the platform is, how it works, and what it means for other users around the world, whether in fact it’s a media company or not.

Here’s how Facebook insiders and outside experts have defined the company:

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook co-founder and chief executive officer, speaking in Rome, Italy, this past summer:

We’re a technology company, we’re not a media company. When you think about a media company, you have people who are producing content, who are editing content, that’s not us. We’re a technology company. We build tools. We do not produce any of the content.

Sheryl Sandberg interviewed on stage at WSJDLive conference in Laguna Beach, California:

Facebook is a platform for all ideas and it’s really core to our mission that people can share what they care about on Facebook. […] We also want to be a very safe community: there’s no place for violence, terrorism, or hate. Those two things can come into conflict because one person’s free expression can be another person’s hate. You can see with lots of these decisions — we’re balancing these things.

Chris Cox, chief product officer at Facebook, speaking at WSJDLive conference in Laguna Beach, California:

We define ourselves as a technology company. A media company is about the stories that it tells. A technology company is about the tools that it builds.

Adam Mosseri, in charge of Newsfeed at Facebook, said at TechCrunch Disrupt:

We think of ourselves as a technology company because, primarily, the problems we deal with on a daily basis are technology problems. We are trying to figure out what people are interested in; how to connect people with the sources of content that they find meaningful; how to rank stories based on how relevant they are to people. These are problems that are primarily technical in nature, which is why we think of ourselves as a technology company. That said, we know that we play a meaningful role in media.

emily bell, founding director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, on Twitter:

Jonathan Taplin, director of the USC Annenberg Lab and author of the forthcoming book Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy, told USA TODAY:

They increasingly are determining how news gets disseminated, even made, in terms of how you write headlines, how you write articles. I would argue that they’re the most important news organization in the world.

Jason Hirschhorn, chief executive officer and chief curator at REDEF, said on Twitter:

Brian Stelter, CNN senior media correspondent and host of Reliable Sources, told Business Insider:

One traditional definition of a media company is ‘a company that delivers information to users and profits by selling ads next to the information.’ By that definition, Facebook is a media company. Facebook does not produce the information it distributes, but it is profiting from the ads.

Peter Kafka of Recode:

We get it. We understand why you don’t want to call Facebook a media company. But here’s the deal. When you gather people’s attention*, and sell that attention to advertisers, guess what? You’re a media company.

David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect, said during an interview with Bloomberg:

They are the world’s #1 source of news. […] Therefore there is a unique set of responsibilities incumbent upon them. I think to some degree they are still a little immature as a company to even know how to deal with that. Being a news source and having editors is a relatively new thing.