I write about issues going on in transition from traditional print media to on-line digital media in my posting Old media and digital media – part 1. This post is a continuation to it. The situation does not look too good for traditional media. Traditional media has been able to solve it’s challenges with aggregation or pay-wall. The future seems to be quite bad for traditional print media that can’t adapt to changed situation.
Despite two decades of trying, no one has found a way to make traditional news-gathering sufficiently profitable to assure its future survival. Only about a third of Americans under 35 look at a newspaper even once a week, and the percentage declines every year. A large portion of today’s readers of the few remaining good newspapers are much closer to the grave than to high school. Today’s young people skitter around the Internet. Audience taste seems to be changing, with the result that among young people particularly there is a declining appetite for the sort of information packages the great newspapers provided.
What is the future of media? There is an interesting article on future of media written in Finnish on this: Median tulevaisuus ja 13 trendiä – mitä media on vuonna 2030? It shows 13 trends that I have here translated to English, re-arranged, added my comments and links to more information to them. In 2030, the media will look very different than today.
The new gerations no longer want to pay for the media: Since the same information, benefits, entertainment provided free of charge, they are not prepared to pay. Older generations support the traditional media for some time, but they are smaller each year. Media consumption continues to rapidly change, and advertisers will follow suit digital and mobile channels, which will affect the media sales because advertisers no longer need the intermediary role of the media companies to communicate with their customers.
This does not look good for media companies, but situation even worse than that: When media personnel, production and distribution costs are rising every year and so the order than the ad revenue will be reduced year by year, deprivation twist to push media companies to the rest of the best authors, owners become impatient and expected returns are reduced. Companies are moving their marketing investment priorities for the purchased media.Corporate communications professionals continues to grow and the number of suppliers will continue to fall.
Technological developments enhance the above trends: Technology eliminates the barriers to entry to the traditional media sector and at the same time create new sectors. Technological media competition winner takes all because new scalable technology to create competitive advantages. Very many news writing tasks can be automated with near real-time and reliable enough translation technology The media world is undergoing a wholesale shift from manual processes to automated systems that strip out waste and inefficiency (The Future of Programmatic: Automation + Creativity + Scale).
Strong continuous technological change and automation mean that media consumption will continue to change for the next decade at least as strong as the previous ten years, whether we like it or not. Critical journalism makes searching for new alternative ways to do their work and to fund its work.
Media’s direction is sure to bring, and an ever increasing rate - in an increasingly digital, more mobile, more and more tailor-made … The newspapers will be read mostly on mobile devices. Information is obtained much earlier, in an increasingly digital and real-time. A lot has changed now already.
871 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook:
Facebook launches election tool with information on national, state, and local candidates and issues, lets voters choose to share choices for specific races
Preparing for the US Election 2016
http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/10/preparing-for-the-us-election-2016/
Tomi Engdahl says:
If I receive written permission to use content from a paper without citing, is it plagiarism?
http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/79218/if-i-receive-written-permission-to-use-content-from-a-paper-without-citing-is-i
Let’s say I find an article online. I contact the writer of this article and, without expecting anything in return, they agree to give me full, unrestricted rights to use any portion of their article, including directly using quotes from the article, without citing it. The agreement even allows me to claim the work as my own, even though it isn’t.
Because I have all the rights to do this, would this be considered plagiarism?
Yes, it is plagiarism. The permission is irrelevant.
Consider this simplified but actually equivalent example: if your neighbor allows you to copy her answers in a written exam, is that not cheating just because she allowed you to use her answers? Of course not, that is ridiculous! It is cheating simply because you didn’t come up with the answers yourself; whether or not you had your neighbor’s permission is completely irrelevant.
You are confusing two orthogonal things: plagiarism and copyright violation.
Plagiarism is an ethical concept; it refers to passing off other’s work as your own. Copyright violation is a legal concept; it means using a creative work in a way that is reserved for the copyright holder without acquiring a license from the copyright holder.
Those concepts are orthogonal: if you copy large portions from a book and you properly cite and attribute them, it’s still a copyright violation even though it’s not plagiarism. And in your example, it’s still plagiarism even though it’s not a copyright violation.
Note: plagiarism may come up in a legal context as well. For example, in most institutions of higher education, there are rules forbidding plagiarism
Plagiarism is passing of the work of someone else as your own. So regardless of the authors permission, this is absolutely plagiarism.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Lucia Moses / Digiday:
Condé Nast’s Wired Media Group is launching the Emerging Tech Council, a $4K/year membership program for executives who want to stay ahead of tech trends
Wired, with other Conde Nast tech publications, starts a $4,000-a-year-membership program
http://digiday.com/publishers/wired-media-group-launches-4000-year-membership-program/
In the quest for new sources of revenue, publishers have been launching subscription programs and events series.
Condé Nast’s Wired Media Group, consisting of Wired, Ars Technica and Backchannel, is going a step further. It’s launching a membership program for executives who want to stay on the cutting edge of technology. For $4,000 a year, members of the Emerging Technology Council (and up to four of their colleagues) get access to in-person and virtual events where they can hear presentations by tech startups; join a 24/7 online community; receive a newsletter (likely monthly) and other perks. The first event, set to take place in January, will be a virtual discussion on intelligence and machine learning with Ars Technica founder and editor in chief Ken Fisher.
The content is specifically geared to people in the C-suite, and there are only so many people who will be able to justify the program’s high price tag.
The Wired Media Group’s partner on the program is Traction Technology Partners, a startup founded by Erick Schonfeld and Neal Silverman, who produced the tech conferences Demo and TechCrunch Disrupt. Schonfeld, also the former editor of TechCrunch, said he got the idea for the format when he saw that conferences didn’t do a great job at keeping people connected in between events.
“They tend to be snapshots in time where everyone comes together,” he said. “From the point of view of the event organizer, you’re essentially starting from scratch every time.”
The model he came up with blends industry conferences with a peer-to-peer leadership council. It has similarities to ones offered by National Journal, which charges $5,000 to $50,000 a year, depending on the size of the organization, for specialized research and tools plus networking events.
Having an ongoing membership program requires extra caretaking; the Wired Media Group program will have 10 people dedicated to it
Tomi Engdahl says:
Android apps will soon be able to offer cheaper, introductory subscription prices
All in hopes you won’t cancel when the normal rate kicks in
http://www.theverge.com/2016/11/3/13511622/google-play-android-introductory-subscriptions
At its Playtime event for Android developers today, Google announced that apps on the Play Store will soon gain a new option that could have huge implications for subscriptions: temporary promotional pricing. “Coming soon, you’ll be able to create an introductory price for new subscribers for a set period of time,” Google’s Larissa Fontaine wrote in a blog post. “For example, you can offer a subscription for $1 per month for the first three months before the normal subscription price kicks in.”
There are many app categories where this could make a big difference. Music and video are certainly on that list; maybe cheaper introductory pricing could boost Google’s own struggling YouTube Red service, or help Spotify maintain its lead over Apple Music and other rivals.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Max Read / New York Magazine:
Facebook’s massive reach, abundance of emotionally charged fake viral stories, and lack of traditional gatekeepers helped Donald Trump win — A close and — to pundits, journalists, and Democrats — unexpected victory like Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s is always overdetermined …
Donald Trump Won Because of Facebook
http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/11/donald-trump-won-because-of-facebook.html
A close and — to pundits, journalists, and Democrats — unexpected victory like Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s is always overdetermined, and no one particular thing pushed Trump over the edge on Tuesday night. His chosen party’s lately increasing openness to explicit white nationalism, the still-recent global-scale failure of the liberal economic consensus, the apparently deep-seated misogyny and racism of the American electorate, Hillary Clinton’s multiple shortcomings as a candidate, or even the last-minute intervention of FBI director James Comey might each have been, on its own, sufficient to hand the election to a man who is, by any reckoning, a dangerous and unpredictable bigot.
Still, it can be clarifying to identify the conditions that allowed access to the highest levels of the political syste a man so far outside what was, until recently, the political mainstream that not a single former presidential candidate from his own party would endorse him. In this case, the condition was: Facebook.
To some extent I’m using “Facebook” here as a stand-in for the half-dozen large and influential message boards and social-media platforms where Americans now congregate to discuss politics, but Facebook’s size, reach, wealth, and power make it effectively the only one that matters.
The most obvious way in which Facebook enabled a Trump victory has been its inability (or refusal) to address the problem of hoax or fake news. Fake news is not a problem unique to Facebook, but Facebook’s enormous audience, and the mechanisms of distribution on which the site relies
All throughout the election, these fake stories, sometimes papered over with flimsy “parody site” disclosures somewhere in small type, circulated throughout Facebook
And it is, truly, vast: Something like 170 million people in North America use Facebook every day, a number that’s not only several orders of magnitude larger than even the most optimistic circulation reckonings of major news outlets but also about one-and-a-half times as many people as voted on Tuesday. Forty-four percent of all adults in the United States say they get news from Facebook, and access to to an audience of that size would seem to demand some kind of civic responsibility
Worst of all, it’s not clear there’s any remedy. The truth is that Facebook seems less malevolent here than insecure about its power, unsure of its purpose, and unclear about what its responsibilities really are.
Of course, lies and exaggerations have always been central to real political campaigns; Facebook has simply made them easier to spread, and discovered that it suffers no particular market punishment for doing so — humans seem to have a strong bias toward news that confirms their beliefs, and environments where those beliefs are unlikely to be challenged.
Who needs a GOTV database when you have millions of voters worked into a frenzy by nine months of sharing impassioned lies on Facebook, encouraging each other to participate?
None of this is, in particular, new; the structures of political power have been challenged frequently in the past century, mostly by the arrival of new media — radio, television, cable — that changed the scale of the audience, and, consequently, the political and social culture of the country. Every time a new medium expands the possible audience of mass media, and opens up new spaces for new voices to be heard, it upsets the delicate balances of power that rested upon the previous media structure.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Building a Better News Feed for You
June 29, 2016
http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/06/building-a-better-news-feed-for-you/
The goal of News Feed is to show people the stories that are most relevant to them. Today, we’re announcing an update to News Feed that helps you see more posts from your friends and family. We explain this change in more detail here.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How Teens In The Balkans Are Duping Trump Supporters With Fake News
https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became-a-global-hub-for-pro-trump-misinfo?utm_term=.efZxAVlrjG#.wlGr0XWMQb
BuzzFeed News identified more than 100 pro-Trump websites being run from a single town in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.
“This is the news of the millennium!” said the story on WorldPoliticus.com. Citing unnamed FBI sources, it claimed Hillary Clinton will be indicted in 2017 for crimes related to her email scandal.
“Your Prayers Have Been Answered,” declared the headline.
For Trump supporters, that certainly seemed to be the case. They helped the baseless story generate over 140,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook.
Meanwhile, roughly 6,000 miles away in a small town in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, a young man watched as money began trickling into his Google AdSense account.
Over the past year, the Macedonian town of Veles (population 45,000) has experienced a digital gold rush as locals launched at least 140 US politics websites.
The young Macedonians who run these sites say they don’t care about Donald Trump. They are responding to straightforward economic incentives: As Facebook regularly reveals in earnings reports, a US Facebook user is worth about four times a user outside the US. The fraction-of-a-penny-per-click of US display advertising — a declining market for American publishers — goes a long way in Veles. Several teens and young men who run these sites told BuzzFeed News that they learned the best way to generate traffic is to get their politics stories to spread on Facebook — and the best way to generate shares on Facebook is to publish sensationalist and often false content that caters to Trump supporters.
As a result, this strange hub of pro-Trump sites in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia is now playing a significant role in propagating the kind of false and misleading content that was identified in a recent BuzzFeed News analysis of hyperpartisan Facebook pages.
Using domain name registration records and online searches, BuzzFeed News identified over 100 active US politics websites being run from Veles.
Their reasons for launching these sites are purely financial, according to the Macedonians with whom BuzzFeed News spoke.
“I started the site for a easy way to make money,” said a 17-year-old who runs a site with four other people.
Most of the posts on these sites are aggregated, or completely plagiarized, from fringe and right-wing sites in the US.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mike Isaac / New York Times:
Sources: several Facebook execs voiced concerns about company’s role in influencing elections; in all-hands meeting, Zuckerberg maintained the impact was small — SAN FRANCISCO — Late on Tuesday night, as it became clear that Donald J. Trump would defeat Hillary Clinton to win the presidential election …
Facebook, in Cross Hairs After Election, Is Said to Question Its Influence
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/14/technology/facebook-is-said-to-question-its-influence-in-election.html
Late on Tuesday night, as it became clear that Donald J. Trump would defeat Hillary Clinton to win the presidential election, a private chat sprang up on Facebook among several vice presidents and executives of the social network.
What role, they asked each other, had their company played in the election’s outcome?
Facebook’s top executives concluded that they should address the issue and assuage staff concerns at a quarterly all-hands meeting. They also called a smaller meeting with the company’s policy team, according to three people
Facebook has been in the eye of a postelection storm for the last few days, embroiled in accusations that it helped spread misinformation and fake news stories that influenced how the American electorate voted.
Even as Facebook has outwardly defended itself as a nonpartisan information source — Mark. Zuckerberg, chairman and chief executive, said at a conference on Thursday that Facebook affecting the election was “a pretty crazy idea” — many company executives and employees have been asking one another if, or how, they shaped the minds, opinions and votes of Americans.
Even more are reassessing Facebook’s role as a media company and wondering how to stop the distribution of false information. Some employees have been galvanized to send suggestions to product managers on how to improve Facebook’s powerful news feed: the streams of status updates, articles, photos and videos that users typically spend the most time interacting with.
“A fake story claiming Pope Francis — actually a refugee advocate — endorsed Mr. Trump was shared almost a million times, likely visible to tens of millions,” Zeynep Tufekci, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina who studies the social impact of technology, said of a recent post on Facebook. “Its correction was barely heard. Of course Facebook had significant influence in this last election’s outcome.”
“Of all the content on Facebook, more than 99% of what people see is authentic. Only a very small amount is fake news and hoaxes,” Mr. Zuckerberg wrote. “Overall, this makes it extremely unlikely hoaxes changed the outcome of this election in one direction or the other.”
Mark Zuckerberg / Facebook:
Mark Zuckerberg defends Facebook’s role in the election, claims over 99% of what people see on Facebook is authentic
https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10103253901916271
Of all the content on Facebook, more than 99% of what people see is authentic. Only a very small amount is fake news and hoaxes. The hoaxes that do exist are not limited to one partisan view, or even to politics. Overall, this makes it extremely unlikely hoaxes changed the outcome of this election in one direction or the other.
That said, we don’t want any hoaxes on Facebook.
This is an area where I believe we must proceed very carefully though. Identifying the “truth” is complicated. While some hoaxes can be completely debunked, a greater amount of content, including from mainstream sources, often gets the basic idea right but some details wrong or omitted. An even greater volume of stories express an opinion that many will disagree with and flag as incorrect even when factual. I am confident we can find ways for our community to tell us what content is most meaningful, but I believe we must be extremely cautious about becoming arbiters of truth ourselves.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Trump spent about half of what Clinton did on his way to the presidency
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/09/trump-spent-about-half-of-what-clinton-did-on-his-way-to-the-presidency.html
Donald Trump threw out campaign spending conventions as he stormed his way to the American presidency.
The businessman racked up 278 electoral votes as of Wednesday morning, versus 228 for Clinton
His campaign committee spent about $238.9 million through mid-October, compared with $450.6 million by Clinton’s. That equals about $859,538 spent per Trump electoral vote, versus about $1.97 million spent per Clinton electoral vote.
While Trump’s campaign increased its spending on television ads in its final election push, it still used the traditional outreach tool much less than Clinton’s did.
Clinton’s campaign had about 800 people on payroll at the end of August, versus about 130 for Trump’s.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google, Facebook move to restrict ads on fake news sites
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-advertising-idUSKBN1392MM
Alphabet Inc’s Google (GOOGL.O) and Facebook Inc (FB.O) on Monday announced measures aimed at halting the spread of “fake news” on the internet by targeting how some purveyors of phony content make money: advertising.
Google said it is working on a policy change to prevent websites that misrepresent content from using its AdSense advertising network, while Facebook updated its advertising policies to spell out that its ban on deceptive and misleading content applies to fake news.
The shifts comes as Google, Facebook and Twitter Inc (TWTR.N) face a backlash over the role they played in the U.S. presidential election by allowing the spread of false and often malicious information that might have swayed voters toward Republican candidate Donald Trump.
“We do not integrate or display ads in apps or sites containing content that is illegal, misleading or deceptive, which includes fake news,” Facebook said in a statement, adding that it will continue to vet publishers to ensure compliance.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google to Bar Fake-News Websites From Using Its Ad-Selling Software
False news stories became an issue during the recent presidential election
http://www.wsj.com/articles/google-to-bar-fake-news-websites-from-using-its-ad-selling-software-1479164646
Alphabet Inc.’s Google plans to prohibit fake-news websites from using its ad-selling software, a move that could crimp revenue at those sites.
Tomi Engdahl says:
NSA Chief: Nation-State Made ‘Conscious Effort’ To Sway US Presidential Election
https://politics.slashdot.org/story/16/11/17/2022213/nsa-chief-nation-state-made-conscious-effort-to-sway-us-presidential-election
The head of the US National Security Agency has said that a “nation-state” consciously targeted presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, in order to affect the US election. From an AOL article:
Adm. Michael Rogers, who leads both the NSA and US Cyber Command, made the comments in response to a question about Wikileaks’ release of nearly 20,000 internal DNC emails during a conference presented by The Wall Street Journal. “There shouldn’t be any doubt in anybody’s minds,” Rogers said. “This was not something that was done casually. This was not something that was done by chance. This was not a target that was selected purely arbitrarily. This was a conscious effort by a nation-state to attempt to achieve a specific effect.”
NSA Chief: Nation-state made ‘conscious effort’ to sway US presidential election
http://www.aol.com/article/2016/11/16/nsa-chief-nation-state-made-conscious-effort-to-sway-us-presi/21607615/
Adm. Michael Rogers, who leads both the NSA and US Cyber Command, made the comments in response to a question about Wikileaks’ release of nearly 20,000 internal DNC emails during a conference presented by The Wall Street Journal.
“There shouldn’t be any doubt in anybody’s minds,” Rogers said. “This was not something that was done casually. This was not something that was done by chance. This was not a target that was selected purely arbitrarily. This was a conscious effort by a nation-state to attempt to achieve a specific effect.”
Rogers did not specify the nation-state or the specific effect, though US intelligence officials suspect Russia provided the emails to Wikileaks, after hackers stole them from inside DNC servers and the personal email account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta.
At least two different hacker groups associated with the Russian government were found inside the networks of the DNC over the past year, reading emails, chats, and downloading private documents. Many of those files were later released by Wikileaks.
“The US intelligence community is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of emails,” read a statement from the Department of Homeland Security. “These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mark Zuckerberg / Facebook:
Mark Zuckerberg responds to fake news controversy and outlines projects Facebook is working on to combat the issue
https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10103269806149061
A lot of you have asked what we’re doing about misinformation, so I wanted to give an update.
The bottom line is: we take misinformation seriously. Our goal is to connect people with the stories they find most meaningful, and we know people want accurate information. We’ve been working on this problem for a long time and we take this responsibility seriously. We’ve made significant progress, but there is more work to be done.
I want to outline some of the projects we already have underway:
- Stronger detection. The most important thing we can do is improve our ability to classify misinformation. This means better technical systems to detect what people will flag as false before they do it themselves.
- Easy reporting. Making it much easier for people to report stories as fake will help us catch more misinformation faster.
- Third party verification. There are many respected fact checking organizations and, while we have reached out to some, we plan to learn from many more.
- Warnings. We are exploring labeling stories that have been flagged as false by third parties or our community, and showing warnings when people read or share them.
- Related articles quality. We are raising the bar for stories that appear in related articles under links in News Feed.
- Disrupting fake news economics. A lot of misinformation is driven by financially motivated spam.
- Listening. We will continue to work with journalists and others in the news industry to get their input
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jeff Jarvis / Medium:
John Borthwick of Betaworks and Jeff Jarvis of CUNY offer ideas for tackling fake news on Facebook, Twitter, and Google — We—John Borthwick and Jeff Jarvis—want to offer constructive suggestions for what the platforms—Facebook, Twitter, Google, Instagram, Snapchat, WeChat, Apple News …
A Call for Cooperation Against Fake News
https://medium.com/whither-news/a-call-for-cooperation-against-fake-news-d7d94bb6e0d4#.s2sdq0paz
We — John Borthwick and Jeff Jarvis — want to offer constructive suggestions for what the platforms — Facebook, Twitter, Google, Instagram, Snapchat, WeChat, Apple News, and others — as well as publishers and users can do now and in the future to grapple with fake news and build better experiences online and more civil and informed discussion in society.
Key to our suggestions is sharing more information to help users make better-informed decisions in their conversations: signals of credibility and authority from Facebook to users, from media to Facebook, and from users to Facebook. Collaboration between the platforms and publishers is critical. In this post we focus on Facebook, Twitter, and Google search. Two reasons: First simplicity. Second: today these platforms matter the most.
We do not believe that the platforms should be put in the position of judging what is fake or real, true or false as censors for all. We worry about creating blacklists. And we worry that circular discussions about what is fake and what is truth and whose truth is more truthy masks the fact that there are things that can be done today. We start from the view that almost all of what we do online is valuable and enjoyable but there are always things we can do to improve the experience and act more responsibly.
In that spirit, we offer these tangible suggestions for action and seek your ideas.
1. Make it easier for users to report fake news, hate speech, harassment, and bots.
2. Create a system for media to send metadata about their fact-checking, debunking, confirmation, and reporting on stories and memes to the platforms. It happens now: Mouse over fake news on Facebook and there’s a chance the related content that pops up below can include a news site or Snopes reporting that the item is false.
3. Expand systems of verified sources. As we said, we don’t endorse blacklists or whitelists of sites and sources (though when lists of sites are compiled to support a service — as with Google News — we urge responsible, informed selection). But it would be good if users could know the creator of a post has been online for only three hours with 35 followers or if this is a site with a known brand and proven track record.
4. Make the brands of those sources more visible to users. Media have long worried that the net commoditizes their news such that users learn about events “on Facebook” or “on Twitter” instead of “from the Washington Post.”
5. Track back to original sources of news items and memes. We would like to see these technology platforms use their considerable computing power to help track back and find the source of news items, photos and video, and memes.
6. Address the echo-chamber problem with recommendations from outside users’ conversational spheres.
7. Recognize the role of autocomplete in search requests to spread impressions without substance.
8. Recognize how the design choices can surface information that might be better left under the rock.
9. Create reference sites to enable users to investigate memes and dog whistles. G’bless Snopes; it is the cure for that email your uncle sends that has been forward a hundred times. Bless also Google for making it easy to search to learn the meanings of Pepe the frog and Wikipedia for building entries to explain the origins.
10. Establish the means to subscribe to and distribute corrections and updates. We would love it if we could edit a mistaken tweet. We understand the difficulty of that, once tweets have flown the nest to apps and firehoses elsewhere.
11. Media must learn and use the lesson of memes to spread facts over lies.
12. Stop funding fake news. Google and Facebook have taken steps in the right direction to pull advertising and thus financial support (and motivation) for fake-news sites.
13. Support white-hat media hacking. The platforms should open themselves up to help from developers to address the problems we outline here.
14. Hire editors. We strongly urge the platforms to hire high-level journalists inside their organizations not to create content, not to edit, not to compete with the editors outside but instead to bring a sense of public responsibility to their companies and products
15. Collaborate in an organization to support the cause of truth; research and develop solutions; and educate platforms, media companies, and the public.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Aarti Shahani / NPR:
Sources describe how Facebook’s community operations team, which consists of several thousand people, rapidly judges flagged content
From Hate Speech To Fake News: The Content Crisis Facing Mark Zuckerberg
http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/17/495827410/from-hate-speech-to-fake-news-the-content-crisis-facing-mark-zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg — one of the most insightful, adept leaders in the business world — has a problem. It’s a problem he has been slow to acknowledge, even though it’s become more apparent by the day.
Several current and former Facebook employees tell NPR there is a lot of internal turmoil about how the platform does and doesn’t censor content that users find offensive. And outside Facebook, the public is regularly confounded by the company’s decisions — around controversial posts and around fake news.
Tomi Engdahl says:
John Herrman / New York Times:
Fixation on Fake News Overshadows Waning Trust in Real Reporting
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/19/business/media/exposing-fake-news-eroding-trust-in-real-reporting.html
Something is deeply wrong when the pope’s voice, reputation and influence can be borrowed by a source that describes itself as “a fantasy news site” to claim that he has endorsed a presidential candidate, and then be amplified, unchallenged, through a million individual shares.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Emily Bazelon / New York Times:
Trump and other billionaires have laid the groundwork for using libel laws and the extortionate legal fees they come with to gag the press — A small group of superrich Americans — the president-elect among them — has laid the groundwork for an unprecedented legal assault on the media.
Billionaires vs. the Press
in the Era of Trump
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/22/magazine/billionaires-vs-the-press-in-the-era-of-trump.html?_r=0
A small group of superrich Americans — the president-elect
among them — has laid the groundwork for an
unprecedented legal assault on the media. Can they succeed?
that libel law can be a tool of revenge. It’s disconcerting for a superrich (if maybe not as rich as he says) plaintiff to treat the legal system as a weapon to be deployed against critics. Once installed in the White House, Trump will have a wider array of tools at his disposal, and his record suggests that, more than his predecessors, he will try to use the press — and also control and subdue it.
It’s not within the president’s direct powers to change the rules for libel suits. But our legal safeguards for writers and publishers aren’t foolproof.
This kind of manipulation of the law is unfolding at a keen moment of weakness for the press, which has already been buffeted by falling revenue and mounting public disaffection. Only 40 percent of the public — the lowest rate since at least the 1990s — trusts the media “to report the news fully, accurately and fairly,” according to a Gallup survey conducted in September 2015. This mistrust has been growing for a long time, but it was stoked by Trump during the campaign.
A recent Pew survey found that only half of Trump backers agreed that it was important in a strong democracy that “news organizations are free to criticize political leaders.”
Media outlets have won many cases by persuading a judge to dismiss them. But since 2010, they have succeeded in only 39 percent of the libel and privacy suits that have gone to trial, a dip from 52 percent in the previous decade, according to the Media Law Resource Center. The median damage award has increased fivefold since the 1980s, to $1.1 million.
Superrich plaintiffs, however, aren’t subject to the same market forces. They can treat suing the press as an investment, with the payoff being, at a minimum, the expense and time required for the other side to produce documents and sit for depositions.
It was another billionaire, Peter Thiel, who realized the full potential of bankrolling other people’s lawsuits.
Thiel and other Silicon Valley executives were regular targets of Gawker’s aggressive reporting and mockery.
Thiel didn’t sue on his own behalf. But he secretly paid a Hollywood lawyer, Charles Harder, at least $10 million to sue Gawker on behalf of a suite of plaintiffs.
Hulk Hogan, sued Gawker for violating his privacy by publishing a brief video clip in October 2012
The jury seemed to channel the public’s low regard for the press when they awarded Hogan $140 million in damages.
What’s new here are two forces squeezing journalism like pincers. The first is a figure like Thiel, willing to place bets on lawsuit after lawsuit until he hits on a winning combination of facts, judge and jury. The second is the public’s animosity toward the press, now fueled by the soon-to-be president.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Steven Bertoni / Forbes:
Silicon Valley insiders Peter Thiel and ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt say The Observer’s owner Jared Kushner effectively ran Trump’s campaign — It’s been one week since Donald Trump pulled off the biggest upset in modern political history, and his headquarters at Trum
Exclusive Interview: How Jared Kushner Won Trump The White House
http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2016/11/22/exclusive-interview-how-jared-kushner-won-trump-the-white-house/#1ee91eaf2f50
It’s been one week since Donald Trump pulled off the biggest upset in modern political history, and his headquarters at Trump Tower in New York City is a 58-story, onyx-glassed lightning rod. Barricades, TV trucks and protesters frame a fortified Fifth Avenue. Armies of journalists and selfie-seeking tourists stalk Trump Tower’s pink marble lobby, hoping to snap the next political power player who steps into view.
“If Trump was the CEO, Jared was effectively the chief operating officer.”
“Jared Kushner is the biggest surprise of the 2016 election,” adds Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, who helped design the Clinton campaign’s technology system. “Best I can tell, he actually ran the campaign and did it with essentially no resources.”
No resources at the beginning, perhaps. Underfunded throughout, for sure. But by running the Trump campaign–notably, its secret data operation–like a Silicon Valley startup, Kushner eventually tipped the states that swung the election.
JARED KUSHNER’S ASCENT from Ivanka Trump’s little-known husband to Donald Trump’s campaign savior happened gradually.
Despite his itchy Twitter finger, Trump is a Luddite. He reportedly gets his news from print and television, and his version of e-mail is to handwrite a note that his assistant will scan and attach. Among those in his close circle, Kushner was the natural pick to create a modern campaign.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Michael Barthel / Pew Research Center:
Pew survey finds 59% of US adults think media should present facts without interpretation
Majority of U.S. adults think news media should not add interpretation to the facts
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/18/news-media-interpretation-vs-facts/
A key question that news organizations face, particularly during intense periods like election years, is to what degree journalists should present the facts with some interpretation, giving their audience guidance in navigating all the information that comes at them.
A majority of U.S. adults (59%) reject the idea of adding interpretation, saying that the news media should present the facts alone, a recent Pew Research Center survey found. Four-in-ten favor adding some interpretation to the facts.
Although the public prefers the news media to present “just the facts,” they may not even agree on what the facts are. In the same survey, 81% of registered voters said that most supporters of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump not only disagree over plans and policies, but also disagree on basic facts.
There are substantial partisan differences over whether journalists should include interpretation in their stories. Registered voters who supported Trump for president favored a “just the facts” approach by more than two-to-one, with only 29% saying the news media should add interpretation. Clinton supporters, on the other hand, are evenly split on the issue, with half against interpretation and half favoring it.
One thing the public does approve of to encourage clarity in presenting the news: fact-checking. The vast majority of registered voters say that fact-checking is a responsibility of the news media.
Fully 81% of U.S. adults who prefer facts without interpretation believe fact-checking is a major or minor responsibility of the news media. About the same share of those who prefer interpretation, 83%, think fact-checking is a responsibility.
Taken together, this suggests the public may not see fact-checking as an act of interpretation.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ken Yeung / VentureBeat:
Encrypted messaging app Telegram launches Telegraph, a long-form publishing tool similar to Medium and Quip; no account is needed to publish posts
Telegram launches Telegraph, a long-form publishing platform
http://venturebeat.com/2016/11/22/telegram-launches-telegraph-a-long-form-publishing-platform/
Telegram is branching beyond being a messaging app into something more well-rounded. The company on Tuesday launched Telegraph, a publishing platform with striking similarities to Medium and Quip. What’s interesting about the service is that no account is needed — simply visit the website and begin typing away. When you’re done, hit publish and it’s immediately on the web.
Described as “a publishing tool that lets you create rich posts with markdown, photos, and all sorts of embedded stuff,” Telegraph is an interesting play, especially since it’s as if Facebook Messenger launched a Notes tool, or if Twitter natively integrated with Medium. Creating a post can be done in no time and with little restrictions — you create a title for your screed, enter in someone’s name as the author, and begin typing.
Your post will let you insert videos from YouTube or Vimeo, as well as tweets, just by dropping in the link. Images from your computer can also be embedded.
https://telegram.org/blog/instant-view
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mike Isaac / New York Times:15 minutes ago
Sources: Facebook has quietly built a tool to enable monitoring and suppression of posts based on location, to get back into China; Zuckerberg defended effort — SAN FRANCISCO — Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, has cultivated relationships with China’s leaders, including President Xi Jinping.
Facebook Said to Create Censorship Tool to Get Back Into China
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/22/technology/facebook-censorship-tool-china.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Study: Most Students Can’t Spot Fake News
https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/11/22/150225/study-most-students-cant-spot-fake-news
Even those who think that the U.S. Presidential election wasn’t affected by the swath of fake news articles swirling on Facebook and other social media networks, they tend to agree that there is a lot of misinformation on the web. At Slashdot, it’s hard to say that anyone here will not be able to tell fake news from a real one. But what about kids? How is our future generation doing? Not so well, apparently.
Study: most students can’t spot fake news
That’s one reason why Facebook and Google would want to fight bogus stories.
https://www.engadget.com/2016/11/21/students-have-trouble-spotting-fake-news/
If you thought fake online news was a problem for impressionable adults, it’s even worse for the younger crowd. A Stanford study of 7,804 middle school, high school and college students has found that most of them couldn’t identify fake news on their own. Their susceptibility varied with age, but even a large number of the older students fell prey to bogus reports. Over two thirds of middle school kids didn’t see why they shouldn’t trust a bank executive’s post claiming that young adults need financial help, while nearly 40 percent of high schoolers didn’t question the link between an unsourced photo and the claims attached to it.
Why did many of the students misjudge the authenticity of a story? They were fixated on the appearance of legitimacy, rather than the quality of information. A large photo or a lot of detail was enough to make a Twitter post seem credible, even if the actual content was incomplete or wrong. There are plenty of adults who respond this way, we’d add, but students are more vulnerable than most.
As the Wall Street Journal explains, part of the solution is simply better education: teach students to verify sources, question motivations and otherwise think critically.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Lara O’Reilly / Business Insider:
Publishers’ trade body DCN sends letter to Facebook and Google CEOs calling on the two companies to do more to tackle fake news
A powerful trade body for big publishers sent a letter to Google and Facebook’s CEOs imploring them to tackle fake news
http://nordic.businessinsider.com/dcn-letter-to-mark-zuckerberg-and-sundar-pichai-on-fake-news-2016-11?op=1&r=US&IR=T
Digital Content Next (DCN), a US trade body that represents premium online publishers, has sent a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, calling on the two companies to do more to tackle the fake news being discovered and shared across their sites.
The letter, obtained by Business Insider (which you can read in full below) was written by DCN CEO Jason Kint, says both companies “bear a special responsibility, one that you sometimes appear naïve to” to clean up the “garbage littering the digital media ecosystem.”
Both Google and Facebook are facing increased scrutiny about their efforts to tackle fake news following the US presidential election.
In a world where ever-increasing numbers of people get their news and information through globally scaled, algorithmically determined “feeds,” it is simply unacceptable to tolerate the blatantly false and misleading “fake news” that has come to litter the digital landscape. We regard our relationship as symbiotic; we all want the citizens of our societies to have access to the best possible information. We are in this together and regard our companies as essential partners in this effort. We are ready to devote time, resources and energy to help clean up this mess and welcome the opportunity to collaborate on solutions.
Yours truly, Jason Kint CEO Digital Content Next
Tomi Engdahl says:
Telegram Launches Telegraph, An Anonymous Blogging Platform
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/16/11/23/2150236/telegram-launches-telegraph-an-anonymous-blogging-platform
Telegram has unveiled a new blogging platform called Telegraph, which offers fast publishing and anonymous posting without requiring you to sign up or sign in via social media.
Telegram launches Telegraph, an anonymous blogging platform
No sign-up required
http://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13728726/telegram-anonymous-blogging-platform-telegraph
Telegram now has a blogging platform to go along with its popular messaging app. It’s called Telegraph and, according to VentureBeat, offers fast publishing and anonymous posting — without requiring you to register an account or sign in through social media.
The app’s user interface looks very similar to Medium and allows for easy embeds. You can also embed images from your computer by clicking on the camera button. In comparison to Medium, the loading time for embeds is relatively fast. Publication is instantaneous upon hitting “publish.” Posts are shareable on social media platforms but are designed to work best on Telegram’s new Instant View layout, which works similarly to Facebook’s Instant Articles feature.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Amelia Tait / New Statesman:
Reddit CEO Huffman’s decision to delete and alter comments on Trump thread amounts to censorship and has eroded the site’s credibility with users
Reddit’s CEO edited comments on a pro-Trump thread and everyone should care
http://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/technology/2016/11/reddit-s-ceo-edited-comments-pro-trump-thread-and-everyone-should
Even those who don’t frequent “the front page of the internet” should worry about the implications of this act.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has publicly admitted to editing comments on the pro-Donald Trump subreddit r/the_donald in a move he has described as “trolling the trolls”.
Yet although this might seem like a small and temporary lapse in judgement, the implications are huge.
Normally when a comment is edited on Reddit – by a user or a moderator – a small asterisk will appear after the time stamp to indicate that it has been changed. In this instance, no such asterisk appeared, meaning Huffman ostensibly has the ability to edit comments without a trace. This is crucial because two months ago, a Redditor was taken to court for comments he left on the site. Huffman’s editing powers could clearly be abused to cause trouble for individuals.
Should the users of r/the_donald leave the site, however, the implications could be huge.
many Redditors appear to have already lost faith in the site and its CEO. “This legitimately should result in him being fired,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
McKenzie Funk / New York Times:
How Cambridge Analytica, which was hired by the Trump and Brexit “Leave” campaigns, builds psychological profiles of Facebook users with personality quizzes
The Secret Agenda of a Facebook Quiz
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/the-secret-agenda-of-a-facebook-quiz.html
Do you panic easily? Do you often feel blue? Do you have a sharp tongue? Do you get chores done right away? Do you believe in the importance of art?
If ever you’ve answered questions like these on one of the free personality quizzes floating around Facebook, you’ll have learned what’s known as your Ocean score: How you rate according to the big five psychological traits of Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. You may also be responsible the next time America is shocked by an election upset.
For several years, a data firm eventually hired by the Trump campaign, Cambridge Analytica, has been using Facebook as a tool to build psychological profiles that represent some 230 million adult Americans.
Cambridge Analytica worked on the “Leave” side of the Brexit campaign. In the United States it takes only Republicans as clients
No data point is very informative on its own, but profiling voters, says Cambridge Analytica, is like baking a cake. “It’s the sum of the ingredients,”
The explosive growth of Facebook’s ad business has been overshadowed by its increasing role in how we get our news, real or fake.
One recent advertising product on Facebook is the so-called “dark post”: A newsfeed message seen by no one aside from the users being targeted.
Imagine the full capability of this kind of “psychographic” advertising.
In the immediate wake of Mr. Trump’s surprise election, so many polls and experts were so wrong that it became fashionable to declare that big data was dead. But it isn’t, not when its most obvious avatar, Facebook, was so crucial to victory.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Craig Timberg / Washington Post:
Experts: a Russian propaganda campaign to undermine Clinton helped spread fake news during election using botnets, networks of sites, paid human “trolls”, more
Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/russian-propaganda-effort-helped-spread-fake-news-during-election-experts-say/2016/11/24/793903b6-8a40-4ca9-b712-716af66098fe_story.html
The flood of “fake news” this election season got support from a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy, say independent researchers who tracked the operation.
Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery — including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human “trolls,” and networks of websites and social-media accounts — echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers. The effort also sought to heighten the appearance of international tensions and promote fear of looming hostilities with nuclear-armed Russia.
Two teams of independent researchers found that the Russians exploited American-made technology platforms to attack U.S. democracy at a particularly vulnerable moment
The sophistication of the Russian tactics may complicate efforts by Facebook and Google to crack down on “fake news,” as they have vowed to do after widespread complaints about the problem.
There is no way to know whether the Russian campaign proved decisive in electing Trump, but researchers portray it as part of a broadly effective strategy of sowing distrust in U.S. democracy and its leaders.
“They want to essentially erode faith in the U.S. government or U.S. government interests,”
“This was their standard mode during the Cold War. The problem is that this was hard to do before social media.”
more than 200 websites as routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season, with combined audiences of at least 15 million Americans. On Facebook, PropOrNot estimates that stories planted or promoted by the disinformation campaign were viewed more than 213 million times.
Some players in this online echo chamber were knowingly part of the propaganda campaign, the researchers concluded, while others were “useful idiots”
harnessing the online world’s fascination with “buzzy” content that is surprising and emotionally potent
Some of these stories originated with RT and Sputnik
On other occasions, RT, Sputnik and other Russian sites used social-media accounts to amplify misleading stories already circulating online, causing news algorithms to identify them as “trending” topics that sometimes prompted coverage from mainstream American news organizations.
The speed and coordination of these efforts allowed Russian-backed phony news to outcompete traditional news organizations for audience.
The final weeks of the campaign featured a heavy dose of stories about supposed election irregularities, allegations of vote-rigging and the potential for Election Day violence should Clinton win, researchers said.
“The way that this propaganda apparatus supported Trump was equivalent to some massive amount of a media buy,”
He and other researchers expressed concern that the U.S. government has few tools for detecting or combating foreign propaganda.
The Kremlin has repeatedly denied interfering in the U.S. election or hacking the accounts of election officials.
“They use our technologies and values against us to sow doubt,” said Robert Orttung, a GWU professor who studies Russia. “It’s starting to undermine our democratic system.”
“For them, it’s actually a real war, an ideological war, this clash between two systems,” said Sufian Zhemukhov, a former Russian journalist conducting research at GWU. “In their minds, they’re just trying to do what the West does to Russia.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
The CNN porn scare is how fake news spreads
http://www.theverge.com/2016/11/25/13748226/cnn-accidentally-airs-porn-fake-news-boston
Last night, a twitter account by the name of @solikearose tweeted out a surprising image of CNN broadcasting porn instead of Anthony Bourdain’s scheduled show Parts Unknown. And then without really much questioning, a bunch of news sites ran with it, claiming that the network showed the footage for about 30 minutes.
It looks like the chaos all started when The Independent wrote up a story from this person’s tweets, which was then tweeted out by the Drudge Report. After that, it spread fast. Mashable, The New York Post, The Daily Mail, Esquire, and Variety have all published a story, and pretty much all of these articles are based on one or two tweets from @solikerose. Plus, many of the original stories didn’t include statements from CNN or RCN, the cable company that supposedly aired the porn.
Fact-checking largely didn’t begin until the stories were published.
RCN also released statements on twitter saying there is no evidence that porn was aired last night in Boston
CNN has also released a statement: “The RCN cable operator in Boston aired inappropriate content for 30 minutes on CNN last night. CNN has asked for an explanation.” But that still doesn’t really verify that anything occurred.
The appeal of the story is obvious
But this is exactly how fake news spreads. Even if porn was aired on CNN, it’s clear that a lot of publications ran with a story based on tweets from one person before verifying the facts.
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/5evohm/the_cnn_porn_scare_is_how_fake_news_spreads/
Fake news is not the problem. The problem is that “reputable” news sites do absolutely no fact checking. Whether it’s in an effort to make sure they are first to report it or other excuses we need to hold them accountable in some fashion.
The specific sites which ran with this nonsense:
The Independent
The Drudge Report
Mashable
The New York Post
The Daily Mail
Esquire
Variety
Name ‘em and shame ‘em. Nobody should trust news from these sources.
Actually, The Independent wrote about CNN denying the incident – the whole premise of their story was that they fact-checked and got the story from both the user who perpetrated the hoax and CNN. Some of the sites did report it as a fact, but apparently all except NY Post have updated with context. And none of them are known to be first-class newsmakers in the first place.
Maybe later–when I saw the independents article earlier it was a straightforward article reporting it as truth. I believed it because I think of the independent as a not-terrible news source for the most part.
Oh goodness, the Independent is no longer a decent news source.
When they closed the newspaper they got rid of most of the real journalists and the online operation is done on a shoestring budget. Interns writing up clickbait is the order of the day.
Drudge is just a link aggregator, like Reddit without user submissions or voting
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13040769
This is just wrong news, not fake news. Fake news has become the buzzword du jour but missing in the current application of the term to everything is the main problem is not fake news stories, it’s fake news sites.
Journalists are always going to be wrong some of the time and several factors have been ramping that error rate way up but this has been discussed at length for at least a decade now. But, for the most part, legitimate news sites at least try to vie for truth as one of the competing demands on the business.
What’s genuinely new is sites whose entire business model is predicated on intentional dissemination of knowingly false stories as a major part of the media landscape. Alex Jones style journalism has always existed at the fringes of the media landscape but now are becoming the main news source of a significant proportion of the country and that’s worrying.
Trying to label other things as “fake news” muddies the waters and distracts from the issue.
This is not fake news, but it’s a great example of how the rush to be the first, with no verification, spreads misinformation of all kinds.
And this does not only happen to journalist, but normal people too. It is thus a good reminder to people to check before they retweet or share that article.
From the Verge article: CNN has also released a statement: “The RCN cable operator in Boston aired inappropriate content for 30 minutes on CNN last night. CNN has asked for an explanation.” But that still doesn’t really verify that anything occurred.
Well, CNN was either calling its own content “inappropriate” or they were saying that something occurred.
That’s the point of theverge: one reports it because another site did it and nobody wants to be the one who didn’t have any headline about such event. Which site wants to be the last one to publish something?
Source checking takes a time, being left out of the event costs too much…
More importantly: Being wrong costs nothing, being late costs everything.
I’m not sure what can be done to increase the costs for being wrong, but as a whole humanity does need to find a way to solve that.
Same thing with security breaches today. Unless the attacker destroys the data or steals money, there’s no downside to a company getting hacked. Target and Home Depot are still in business, doing the same thing they were doing beforehand.
This sudden moral panic is absurd. “Fake news” has existed for well over a hundred years: they’re called tabloids. Pulp tabloids were never a problem until a certain presidential election embarassed the polling industry and everyone started looking for a scapegoat.
The number one issue here is that news organizations have been gutted over the last twenty years due to a variety of factors.
CNN under Ted Turner used to have a world-class news team, they’d check sources, they’d investigate the veracity of any claims, they’d get boots on the ground to do their own research. They wouldn’t hesitate to get actual experts on the air, people with qualifications relevant to the situation at hand.
They also had the luxury of being able to dig into a story before “breaking” it, there was time to get everything lined up. Now we’re in an unrelenting hurricane where something pops up on Twitter and literally five minutes later CNN is parroting it as if it’s news.
There’s no budget for fact checking. There’s no time. There’s no buffer against the stream of half-truths, propaganda, and pure bullshit pouring out of this thing we call the internet.
There used to be a substantial difference between The Washington Post and Weekly World News. Today that gap has shrunk to the point where pseudo-news stories end up being published without adequate fact checking and retractions come way too late, if they ever do at all.
CNN’s coverage of the first Gulf War was respectable, they had people in Baghdad observing the situation on the ground. Even their September 11 coverage was pretty good, though they were working on their home turf. By the time complex geopolitical struggles like the insurgency in Iraq or the constantly shifting nature of ISIS emerged they had no ability whatsoever to present a coherent story.
It’s almost as if people don’t care for actual news any more. They’re tired of eating their vegetables.
Tabloids, for all their problems, are not as bad as fake news. They do have standards, they’re just low, and are willing to go on hearsay sometimes. Yet most of what they publish is verifiable, if spun.
Fake news is outright fabricated.
So fake news spreads via real news sites now.
I’m not advocating blacklisting news agencies, but I would strongly suggest everyone take a critical look at their own sources of news, and then at everything they report.
I told a joke at work a few years back, “hey did you hear Betty White dyed?” The obvious joke is she “dyed” as in changed her hair color, but it sounds like “died”. Someone overheard me and it wasn’t long before I heard people mourning one of their favorite celebrities.
News agencies are exactly like that.
All the CNN porn stories’ sources trace back to one single tweet by one user on Twitter. That’s the only original source we have on the CNN porn thing ever happening.
According to these articles, there was porn on CNN over large parts of the east coast, for 30 minutes. 30 minutes of porn on CNN in significant parts of the US, on Thanksgiving evening, and only one person noticed it and decided to post anything about it online? That smells very suspicious.
Thanks. According to Snopes, the story is False [1]. It’s pretty ridiculous that “credible” news sources can write a story like this and then take no responsibility when it’s wrong. I don’t think it’s enough to just correct a story after the fact.
Tomi Engdahl says:
CNN Did Not Air Pornography, But This Is How Fake News Spreads
http://www.refinery29.com/2016/11/131040/cnn-porn-tweet-fake-news
Digital media journalists have become adept at chasing down the 24-hour news cycle and hustling to keep pace with events as they unfold in real time. But only now is the media beginning to catch onto the fake news cycle, which cashes in social media by fabricating clickbait headlines and using shocking imagery.
Case in point: Last night’s CNN pore scare. At 10:32 p.m., @solikearose tweeted, “Uhhh @CNN is straight up porn right now…what happened to @PartsUnknownCNN,” along with a screenshot of what appeared to be just that: Porn airing on CNN instead of Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown. Twitter user @solikearose also alerted Boston-area cable provider RCN, which responded that it hadn’t heard from other viewers about the alleged X-rated programming glitch.
Yet, that possibly fake screenshot and unverified tweet were quickly reported on as fact, The Verge reports. Only after it made headlines at The Independent, Mashable, Esquire, and elsewhere did reporters start to pump their breaks long enough to do some actual reporting.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mathew Ingram / Fortune:
WaPo’s Russian propaganda story has dubious sources, little evidence, and too general claims that describe how any news is usually shared on social media
No, Russian Agents Are Not Behind Every Piece of Fake News You See
http://fortune.com/2016/11/25/russian-fake-news/
Making everyone who shares fake news part of a Russian conspiracy is not helpful.
One of the themes that has emerged during the controversy over “fake news” and its role in the election of Donald Trump is the idea that Russian agents of various kinds helped hack the process by fueling this barrage of false news. But is that really true?
In a recent story, the Washington Post says that this is definitely the case, based on information provided by two groups of what the paper calls “independent researchers.” But the case starts to come apart at the seams the more you look at it.
One group is associated with the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a conservative think tank funded and staffed by proponents of the Cold War between the U.S. and Russia, which says it has been researching Russian propaganda since 2014.
The second group is something called PropOrNot, about which very little is known.
And what about the evidence of this orchestrated Russian intelligence effort to hack the outcome of the American election? Much of it seems flimsy at best.
The researchers with the Foreign Policy Research Institute recently published a report entitled “Trolling for Trump: How Russia Is Trying to Destroy Our Democracy.” The article describes a network of social-media accounts the authors say are being used by Russian agents to sow discord and “destroy Americans’ confidence in their system of government.”
Accounts run by or associated with Russia Today, Sputnik and other state-controlled entities are a fairly obvious source of this kind of thing. But it’s the attempt to broaden this into a nefarious global scheme that weakens the group’s argument.
For example, the article refers to what it calls “useful idiots” as being part of this campaign
The problem with this description is that it could theoretically include anyone on any social-media platform who shares news based on a click-bait headline.
As we know, this describes millions of people who use Twitter and Facebook FB -0.38% . Are they part of the problem? Clearly. Are they Russian dupes? That seems like a stretch. What the report seems to be saying is that Russia took advantage of the social web’s desire to just share things without reading them. It may be true, but so does every other media outlet.
Has the rise of fake news played into the hands of those who want to spread disinformation? Sure it has. But connecting hundreds of Twitter accounts into a dark web of Russian-controlled agents, along with any website that sits on some poorly thought-out blacklist, seems like the beginnings of a conspiracy theory, rather than a scientific analysis of the problem.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mathew Ingram / Fortune:
One group WaPo cited in its Russian propaganda story is associated with Cold War proponents; the second group appears to have launched only recently — One of the themes that has emerged during the controversy over “fake news” and its role in the election of Donald Trump is the idea …
No, Russian Agents Are Not Behind Every Piece of Fake News You See
http://fortune.com/2016/11/25/russian-fake-news/
Making everyone who shares fake news part of a Russian conspiracy is not helpful.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:
Google has been warning prominent journalists and professors that their accounts are under attack from “government-backed attackers” — A flurry of social media reports suggests a major hacking campaign has been uncovered. — Google is warning prominent journalists and professors …
Google warns journalists and professors: Your account is under attack
A flurry of social media reports suggests a major hacking campaign has been uncovered.
http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/11/google-warns-journalists-and-professors-your-account-is-under-attack/
Google is warning prominent journalists and professors that nation-sponsored hackers have recently targeted their accounts, according to reports delivered in the past 24 hours over social media.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sheera Frenkel / BuzzFeed:
How the rise of the Internet, Facebook, and fake news has fueled anti-Muslim sentiment in Myanmar — YANGON, Myanmar — The internet brought Donald Trump to Myanmar. Or, at least that’s how Shar Ya Wai first remembers hearing about the Republican president-elect. — “One day, nobody knew him.
This Is What Happens When Millions Of People Suddenly Get The Internet
https://www.buzzfeed.com/sheerafrenkel/fake-news-spreads-trump-around-the-world?utm_term=.aePkqAzO1#.vtnPjbxXL
Less than 1% of Myanmar had internet access until 2014. Now the country is getting online at an astonishing rate — but so is fake news and anti-Muslim sentiment. Sheera Frenkel finds out what happens when everyone you know joins Facebook at the same time.
YANGON, Myanmar — The internet brought Donald Trump to Myanmar. Or, at least that’s how Shar Ya Wai first remembers hearing about the Republican president-elect.
“One day, nobody knew him. Then, everyone did. That’s what the internet is. It takes people who say crazy things and makes them famous,” the 19-year-old student said.
Like most people in this country of 50 million, which only recently opened up to the outside world, Shar Ya Wai is new to the internet. And on this day, she had walked purposefully into a phone shop in central Yangon to buy her first smartphone, a simple model by China’s Huawei that is popular among her friends. “Today I’ll buy this phone,” she said. “I guess I’ll find out how crazy [the internet] really is.”
“People don’t talk about the normal news they see on Facebook. They talk about the crazy stuff. I never knew about Trump and then everyone was talking about him.”
Today, news sites have become so popular that print magazines called Facebook and The Internet regurgitate stories spotted online for stragglers who have not yet joined the internet revolution. Many of them feature sensational and salacious tales, cribbed from Facebook pages with a very loose definition of facts.
These stories, at least, do little harm. But there has also been an increase in articles that demonize the country’s minority Muslim community, with fake news claiming that vast hordes of Muslim worshippers are attacking Buddhist sites. These articles, quickly shared and amplified on social media, have correlated with a surge in anti-Muslim protests and attacks on local Muslim groups.
If fake news had the power to influence people’s minds during the US elections, in a country with a well-established mainstream media landscape, what could it do in Myanmar, with a nascent news media, only recently freed from the military’s stranglehold?
“People don’t talk about the normal news they see on Facebook. They talk about the crazy stuff.”
Facebook’s influence in Myanmar is hard to quantify, but its domination is so complete that people in Myanmar use “internet” and “Facebook” interchangeably.
For many in Myanmar, the internet and Facebook brought with it the banner of free speech and American values — but no one had told them what would happen if they tested the values of free speech under a government still feeling its way out of military control.
Was it the responsibility of Facebook, or their own government, to teach them how to safely use the internet? Would Facebook protect them for what they wrote online? How do you give people the internet they crave while keeping them safe? And given how many Americans, including Trump, fell for fake news during the elections, how were people in Myanmar expected to judge what was real and what was fake?
“In 2011, our subscribers were in the thousands. Now, we are at 35 million in a country of 50 million,” said Elaine Weidman-Grunewald, vice president of sustainability and corporate responsibility at telecoms giant Ericsson.
The World Bank estimates that roughly 20% of Myanmar is now online, most of that in just the last two years. In comparison, internet use in the United States, where commercial providers began to offer the internet access in late 1989, took seven years to reach a point where 20% of the US was online. In India, which is one of the fastest growing internet markets in the world, internet use took off in 2000, but didn’t reach 20% of the population until mid-2015.
shops that once sold stamps and watches have disappeared, replaced by storefronts crammed with mobile phones and accessories.
“Nobody asks, they don’t care about the email,” he said, explaining that most don’t know that creating an email address is free, and easy. “No one is using that. They have Facebook.”
Myanmar has a “low media and information literacy rate,” according to an interview given by an unnamed official in the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to the Myanmar Times. Often called “digital literacy,” the term measures how well people using the internet understand what they are doing, and how to stay safe online. Countries like Myanmar, which come online quickly and without many government-backed programs to teach safe internet habits — like secure passwords and not revealing personal details online — rank among the lowest in digital literacy. They are the most likely to fall for scams, hacks, and fake news.
Facebook says it’s constantly thinking about ways to improve digital literacy, and that it will soon release a security awareness campaign designed specifically for Myanmar
“Maintaining a safe community for people to connect and share on Facebook and in the services we offer is absolutely critical for us,” Jay Nancarrow, a spokesman for Facebook, told BuzzFeed News.
The 23-year-old poet spent six months in jail after his poem went viral on Facebook. He’s angry, he said, that many news sites mistranslated the poem as saying that he had a tattoo of the president on his penis, when what it should have read was “genital area.”
“Nobody understood the meaning of this poem,”
He never thought that a poem published on Facebook would become international news.
“Every poet publishes on Facebook, that is the only way to get people to see your work. But people aren’t interested in poetry — it is hard to shock them into reading, into understanding,” he said, when explaining why he chose the imagery he did. “I didn’t expect what happened with that poem, but I would do it again.”
He had heard stories of others arrested for Facebook posts
Maung Saung Kha spent six months in prison while his trial was ongoing, and was found to have violated 66(d).
“We should be organizing ourselves, and asking parliament to get rid of these laws,” said Maung Saung Kha. “Nobody understands who is arrested and why. Or what it is that they say that crosses the line.”
Sometimes it might seem like people online are speaking different languages.
When asked if she would recommend the internet to others, Shar Ya Wai hesitated.
“Yes, as long as you know it might make you angry,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Laura Sydell / NPR:
Q&A with Jestin Coler, registered Democrat and founder of Disinfomedia, which owns fake news sites including the Denver Guardian, on ad networks, money, more — A lot of fake and misleading news stories were shared across social media during the election.
We Tracked Down A Fake-News Creator In The Suburbs. Here’s What We Learned
http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/503146770/npr-finds-the-head-of-a-covert-fake-news-operation-in-the-suburbs
A lot of fake and misleading news stories were shared across social media during the election. One that got a lot of traffic had this headline: “FBI Agent Suspected In Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead In Apparent Murder-Suicide.” The story is completely false, but it was shared on Facebook over half a million times.
We wondered who was behind that story and why it was written. It appeared on a site that had the look and feel of a local newspaper. Denverguardian.com even had the local weather. But it had only one news story — the fake one.
We tried to look up who owned it and hit a wall. The site was registered anonymously.
The Denver Guardian was built and designed using a pretty common platform — WordPress.
site was done by someone with the handle LetTexasSecede.
“I was able to track that through to a bunch of other sites which are where that handle is also present.”
That meant they were all very likely owned by the same company.
Online, Coler was listed as the founder and CEO of a company called Disinfomedia.
“I don’t know what to tell you guys. Have a good day.”
We left Coler our contact information thinking he wasn’t likely to talk. But a couple of hours later he had a change of heart. He sent us an email and we set up an interview.
He was amazed at how quickly fake news could spread and how easily people believe it.
During the run-up to the presidential election, fake news really took off.
“Trump supporters just waiting to eat up this red meat that they’re about to get served,” Coler says.
Coler says his writers have tried to write fake news for liberals — but they just never take the bait.
Coler’s company, Disinfomedia, owns many faux news sites — he won’t say how many. But he says his is one of the biggest fake-news businesses out there, which makes him a sort of godfather of the industry.
At any given time, Coler says, he has between 20 and 25 writers.
He says stories like this work because they fit into existing right-wing conspiracy theories.
“The people wanted to hear this,” he says. “So all it took was to write that story. Everything about it was fictional: the town, the people, the sheriff, the FBI guy. And then … our social media guys kind of go out and do a little dropping it throughout Trump groups and Trump forums and boy it spread like wildfire.”
And as the stories spread, Coler makes money from the ads on his websites. He wouldn’t give exact figures, but he says stories about other fake-news proprietors making between $10,000 and $30,000 a month apply to him. Coler fits into a pattern of other faux news sites that make good money, especially by targeting Trump supporters.
However, Coler insists this is not about money. It’s about showing how easily fake news spreads. And fake news spread wide and far before the election.
Coler, a registered Democrat, says he has no regrets about his fake news empire. He doesn’t think fake news swayed the election.
“There are many factors as to why Trump won that don’t involve fake news,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Damien Gayle / The Guardian:
A proposal to censor online videos depicting non-conventional consensual sexual acts is currently passing through the UK’s Parliament; campaigners condemn it
UK to censor online videos of ‘non-conventional’ sex acts
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/23/censor-non-conventional-sex-acts-online-internet-pornography
Campaigners label bill targeted at online pornography a ‘prurient’ intervention that will take Britain’s censorship regime back to pre-internet era
Tomi Engdahl says:
Covering Trump: An oral history of an unforgettable campaign
http://www.cjr.org/special_report/trump_media_press_journalists.php
The election of Donald Trump has upended much of America — not least the establishment press.
Reporters, their editors, and the owners of the outlets that hired them have spent the last two weeks in an unprecedented bout of hand-wringing, trying to understand how they so misread the American electorate and how they should cover a US president who has made no secret of his contempt for journalists and their profession.
Did Trump’s scorched-earth tactics mortally wound the media?
http://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumps_tactics_wound_the_media.php
The 2016 presidential election took a heavy toll on the vast army of journalists assigned to cover it, grinding down shoe leather, fingertips, and nerve-endings in equal measure.
“Towards the end it was crazy,” Dale says. “The only thing that made it easier was that Trump repeated himself: we called him out for lying but he was so unresponsive he just kept saying the same things.”
From mid September until Election Day, Dale recorded a total of 560 false Trump statements, an average of about 20 a day.
Then came election night. “I was as shocked as many other journalists,”
Newspaper endorsements, those most portentous of journalistic institutions, also seemed to have little purchase on the outcome of this convention-shattering election.
Put all these indicators together, and you start to wonder whether Donald Trump’s unlikely victory has sounded the death knell for the influence and authority of what he and his supporters scathingly call the “mainstream media”. Did “MSM,” in particular cable TV which broadcast his every cough and spittle with almost obsessive dedication, help put him in the White House?
Reporters deemed to be producing unfavorable copy were punished by Trump: Jorge Ramos was ejected from a press conference after the Univision anchor dared to ask an awkward question; Coppins was turned away from Trump rallies as comeuppance for his caustic 2014 profile; a lengthening list of other media outlets were banned by the campaign; individual journalists were targeted for bullying such as NBC New’s Katy Tur; supporters at campaign stops were enabled to turn in anger against camera operators just doing their jobs, screaming: “CNN sucks! CNN sucks! CNN sucks!”
Since Trump’s metamorphosis into president-elect, the tendency to target the media has only got worse.
“I’ve never seen anything quite like this,” says Baquet, who as former editor of The Los Angeles Times and Washington bureau chief of the Times has seen more than most. “I don’t think we’ve ever had a president-elect tweeting about us, that’s for sure.”
It’s not just the lack of access, mocking and bullying that can be anticipated from President Trump. There’s also the internal danger that the media will normalize his time in office under the cloak of traditional reverence for the presidency.
So what will be the role of the “Mainstream Media” as it embarks, somewhat battered but still standing, into Trump’s America? Will it be to document the new administration with a detached and “objective” eye, as traditional newsroom canons dictate, or will it pursue that other burning function of the fourth estate, holding power to account?
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sue Shellenbarger / Wall Street Journal:
Study of 7.8K students from middle school through college finds most can’t spot fake news; 82% middle-schoolers couldn’t tell “sponsored content” from real news
Most Students Don’t Know When News Is Fake, Stanford Study Finds
http://www.wsj.com/articles/most-students-dont-know-when-news-is-fake-stanford-study-finds-1479752576
Preteens and teens may appear dazzlingly fluent, flitting among social-media sites, uploading selfies and texting friends. But they’re often clueless about evaluating the accuracy and trustworthiness of what they find.
Some 82% of middle-schoolers couldn’t distinguish between an ad labeled “sponsored content” and a real news story on a website, according to a Stanford University study of 7,804 students from middle school through college. The study, set for release Tuesday, is the biggest so far on how teens evaluate information they find online. Many students judged the credibility of newsy tweets based on how much detail they contained or whether a large photo was attached, rather than on the source.
More than two out of three middle-schoolers couldn’t see any valid reason to mistrust a post written by a bank executive arguing that young adults need more financial-planning help.
Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google are taking steps to prevent sites that disseminate fake news from using their advertising platforms, and Twitter Inc. is moving to curb harassment by users. But that won’t get rid of false or biased information online, which comes from many sources, including deceptive advertising, satirical websites and misleading partisan posts and articles.
A growing number of schools are teaching students to be savvy about choosing and believing various information sources, a skill set educators label “media literacy.”
However, fewer schools now have librarians, who traditionally taught research skills. And media literacy has slipped to the margins in many classrooms, to make room for increased instruction in basic reading and math skills.
parents pick up on their children’s interests and help them to find and evaluate news on the topic online. Encourage them to read a variety of sources.
Evaluating the Credibility of News Sources
Parents can instill early a healthy skepticism about published reports.
He notices when they have trouble sorting facts from fiction, and “we spend a good deal of time asking them where they get their information,” Mr. Tran says. He and his wife also ask them during family dinners about topics they’ve been exploring, “and hopefully challenge them to think,” he says.
By middle school, preteens are online 7-1/2 hours a day outside of school, research shows. Many students multitask by texting, reading and watching video at once, hampering the concentration needed to question content and think deeply
Evaluating the Credibility of a Source
By age 18, 88% of young adults regularly get news from Facebook and other social media, according to a 2015 study of 1,045 adults ages 18 to 34 by the Media Insight Project.
This risks creating an “echo chamber effect,” because social media tends to feed users news items similar to those they’ve read before, says Walter C. Parker, a professor of education at the University of Washington, Seattle. He advises parents to ask children about what they’re reading online, and let them see you reading news from a variety of sources.
Teens also can learn basic skills used by professional fact-checkers
explain to teens that a top ranking on Google doesn’t mean an article is trustworthy.
Students should learn to evaluate sources’ reliability based on whether they’re named, independent and well-informed or authoritative, says Jonathan Anzalone, assistant director of the Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University in New York. Posts should cite multiple sources, and the information should be verifiable elsewhere, he says.
Distinguishing Between Opinion and News
As part of Stanford University’s study of students and online news, it asked middle-school students which of the items above would they read to learn the facts. More than 60% of 200 respondents chose the opinion piece or failed to give clear reasons why they chose the news story.
Talk with teens about information they’ve found online and ask, “Why did you click on that?”
“A rule of thumb at our house is that if an article on a serious topic is less than 100 words,” the length of some fake-news items, more research is needed, says Mr. Secor, of Raleigh, N.C.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Freddy Mayhew / Press Gazette:
UK publisher Newsquest ask readers of its South London papers to write and post their own stories following editorial cuts and redundancies — Newsquest has asked readers of its south London titles to write the news themselves and publish it online as part of a “simplified process” for sharing their stories.
Newsquest asks readers to write and publish stories as part of ‘simplified’ news sharing process
http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/newsquest-asks-readers-to-write-and-publish-stories-as-part-of-simplified-news-sharing-process/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Gerry Smith / Bloomberg:
The problem with an algorithmic solution for Facebook’s fake news problem is that many news stories are partially accurate
Facebook’s Fake News Crackdown: It’s Complicated
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-23/facebook-s-quest-to-stop-fake-news-risks-becoming-slippery-slope
Last week, a story claiming that Ford Motor Co. was moving truck production from Mexico to Ohio went viral on Facebook. “The Trump Effect: It’s Happening Already!!” the Facebook user Right Wing News wrote. That story was actually based on a CNN report from 2015, before Donald Trump was even the Republican nominee for president.
The post was neither entirely true nor completely false. It fell into a gray area in the nuanced world of fact-checking, highlighting the thorny challenge of cracking down on fake news. While some articles are obviously fake, like one about the Pope endorsing Trump, many others are misleading, exaggerated or distorted, but contain a kernel of truth. They require judgment calls, and it can be hard to tell where to draw the line, professional fact-checkers say.
“It is a very slippery slope,” said Eugene Kiely, the director of FactCheck.org, a nonprofit that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics. “There’s bad information out there that’s not necessarily fake. It’s never as clear-cut as you think.”
Facebook is taking steps to address its role in spreading fake news, such as enlisting the help of third-party fact-checkers
Yet professional fact-checkers say Facebook must not punish articles that are partially accurate. They say their jobs, like the truth, can be complicated, which is why they grade stories on a scale. For example, Snopes.com called the Ford Ohio story “mostly false,” and labels others “unproven” or a “mixture” of true and false. The fact-checking website PolitiFact uses labels like “true,” “half true,” or “pants on fire.” Facebook’s algorithm may not understand the various shades of falsehood.
“It’s easy to see how an algorithm-only solution to fake news could result in blocking stuff that’s not false or is misleading for reasons that are partisan but not inaccurate,”
Tweaking the Algorithm
In recent days, media critics and fact checkers have suggested a variety of ways that Facebook could address the problem of fake news. One solution: Facebook could tweak its algorithm to promote related articles from sites like FactCheck.org so they show up next to questionable stories on the same topic in the news feed. Last month, for example, Google announced that it would start labeling fact-checked articles in Google News results.
“If we’ve all looked at it and all agreed this is something that is false or misleading, there should be a way to push that up and bring that to the attention of the reader,” Kiely said
Facebook should also make it easier for users to flag fake news
‘Overwhelming’ the Checkers
But even an army of fact-checkers may not be enough to police the deluge of dubious stories on Facebook. Snopes.com, for instance, gets as many as 300 e-mails an hour from internet users asking whether something they’ve read is true or not
With so much fake news to debunk, Facebook could hire a team of fact-checkers to verify only the most popular articles, Mantzarlis said. Those people could investigate the top stories in Facebook’s “trending” section, for example. In doing so, Facebook could cripple the reach of repeat offenders and flag their posts as being deemed fake, he said.
“No one wants Facebook to deploy 1 million fact-checkers on every single post,” he said. “The problem is the stuff that surfaces all the way to the trending section. That’s a place where Facebook could make a large impact with relatively small commitment.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Michael Calderone / The Huffington Post:
News outlets reported Trump’s claim about millions voting illegally as if it were true — Newsrooms are still coming to grips with a soon-to-be-president able to distract and distort on Twitter. — NEW YORK On Sunday afternoon, Politico editorial director for digital Blake Hounshell rightly pointed …
Media Helps Boost Donald Trump’s False Claim That ‘Millions’ Voted Illegally
Newsrooms are still coming to grips with a soon-to-be-president able to distract and distort on Twitter.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-false-claim-millions-popular-vote_us_583b5ed0e4b09b605600e42a
On Sunday afternoon, Politico editorial director for digital Blake Hounshell rightly pointed out that President-elect Donald Trump’s claim that he actually won the popular vote, because “millions” of Americans had voted illegally, isn’t true.
“Trump claims, falsely, that millions voted illegally,” Hounshell tweeted, along with a Politico story on the matter.
This isn’t to pick on Politico, which was one of several news organizations to quickly publish stories Sunday based on Trump’s Twitter claim without clarifying in the headline that it was false. And Politico, unlike some others, later updated its headline.
But the rush of stories on the president-elect’s “millions” claims highlights the media’s tendency ― now on show for nearly 18 months ― to immediately churn out articles based on Trump’s latest unsubstantiated claims or unwarranted attacks on Twitter.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Zachary M. Seward / Quartz:
Voter fraud claim had already been debunked by Snopes and Politifact, after being shared on Facebook 50K+ times, before Trump tweeted it — Fake news, we have learned over the past several weeks, is spread easily by profiteers, propagandists, and performance artists.
Donald Trump, editor-in-chief of the fake news movement
http://qz.com/846551/donald-trump-editor-in-chief-of-the-fake-news-movement/
Lee Fang / The Intercept:
Laura Ingraham, currently under consideration for White House press secretary role, owns many websites including LifeZette, which frequently publishes fake news — The extraordinary phenomenon of fake news spread by Facebook and other social media during the 2016 presidential election …
Some Fake News Publishers Just Happen to Be Donald Trump’s Cronies
https://theintercept.com/2016/11/26/laura-ingraham-lifezette/
The extraordinary phenomenon of fake news spread by Facebook and other social media during the 2016 presidential election has been largely portrayed as a lucky break for Donald Trump.
Laura Ingraham, a close Trump ally currently under consideration to be Trump’s White House press secretary, owns an online publisher called Ingraham Media Group that runs a number of sites, including LifeZette, a news site that frequently posts articles of dubious veracity.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ross Benes / Digiday:
Viral publishers like ViralNova, Distractify, and Upworthy are attracting fewer media buyers as they struggle with fraud, lose traffic
‘It was a fad’: Many once-hot viral publishers have cooled off
http://digiday.com/publishers/viral-media-complex-cooled/
Viral publishers have been inoculated.
Media buyers tell Digiday that interest in viral publishers — such as ViralNova and Distractify, who built large audiences by sharing uplifting content on Facebook — has cooled as reliance upon platforms left the sites exposed to Facebook’s algorithm changes and inconsistent traffic. And several viral publishers have been unable to overcome fraud and viewability issues, sources said. Some have also seen their traffic decline, according to third-party data.
“I think buyers pay less attention and they get less consideration than previously, in part because it was a fad that had its bubble burst,” said Rob Griffin, chief innovation officer at Almighty.
By relying on clickbait headlines and emotional content, Upworthy, the granddaddy of viral publishers grew quickly: By the end of 2013, it drew in 45 million to 85 million unique visitors per month, according to Quantcast. Spotting that growth, several viral publishers popped up with the intent of copying Upworthy’s success.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Carrie Brown:
In election coverage, the press has done a better job of representing white working-class voters than it has marginalized groups like ethnic minorities
What Journalism Needs To Do Post-Election
Doubling down on catering to white people or so-called impartiality is not the answer
https://medium.com/@Brizzyc/what-journalism-needs-to-do-post-election-98a14b87937#.kjw85mwbr
Tomi Engdahl says:
Chris Moran:
Lessons from The Guardian’s ex-Audience Editor Chris Moran: editorial responsibility should not be passed onto algorithms, time spent is a key metric, more
What I learned from seven years as the Guardian’s audience editor
https://medium.com/@chrismoranuk/what-i-learned-from-seven-years-as-the-guardians-audience-editor-621df42c14ab#.6y6kampst
1. Data belongs in the newsroom
2. Data isn’t everything
3. Sometimes you don’t need data
4. We should all be spending more time looking at time spent
5. Don’t say something’s an experiment unless you have a target
6. Data that you don’t like is more important than the data you do like
7. Don’t treat global audiences in a lump because they happen to use the same platform
8. When is the best time to publish something? When the audience is awake and you have the room to promote it.
9. We should be thinking about who will read something and how
10. There is no reality in which this is a good headline
And finally…
People really, really do want to read great journalism on the internet.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ken Doctor / Nieman Lab:
Canada has lost about half of its journalists in the last decade, sources say, as government assesses future without country’s two largest newspaper companies — Canada’s press woes are bad enough unto themselves, but they also serve as a sign of earlier winter for the U.S. press.
Newsonomics: Canada’s government imagines what a news-less future might look like
Canada’s press woes are bad enough unto themselves, but they also serve as a sign of earlier winter for the U.S. press.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/11/newsonomics-canadas-government-imagines-what-a-news-less-future-might-look-like/
Given our stunning recent news weeks here in the U.S., you may have missed a little story from up north in mid-November. In what was truly an extraordinary statement, the government of Canada is now considering “what the media landscape would look like without the country’s two largest newspaper companies.”
Yes, you read that right. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has his Department of Canadian Heritage studying what a post-press future might look like — and what its implications might be for one of the most civil democracies in the world. Canada’s two largest newspaper companies are Postmedia, with 44 dailies, and Torstar, which owns the largest circulation daily The Star. Together, they account for nearly half of the roughly 100 remaining dailies serving Canada’s 35 million people. Likewise, they employ about half the number of the nation’s daily journalists.
The stark numbers: Canada, like the U.S., has lost about half its journalists in the last decade
Canada’s press woes are bad enough unto themselves, but they also serve as a sign of earlier winter for the U.S. press. We find the same conditions — accelerating print revenue loss and increasing private equity ownership — on both sides of the border. Combine a Trump presidency with further reduction in journalistic capacity and, by 2020, the press — which fairly and unfairly came in for much criticism in this election — will likely be much smaller and weaker.
ongoing mess that Postmedia, the country’s largest newspaper company
The result: it’s embarked on one poorly executed strategy after another and serially shed staff. Now those papers — dominant in large cities from Vancouver to Calgary to Ottawa to Montreal— may not be able to publish at all in the next few years.
Toronto star columnist David Olive described the company as “a foreign-controlled, debt-burdened contrivance flirting with insolvency that nonetheless is relied upon by about 21 million Canadian readers.”
Like their U.S. counterparts, Canadian daily newspapers saw the long decline of print advertising speed up in the middle of 2016.
A parallel House of Commons inquiry into press conditions has been underway for months.
“If information is not reliable and verifiable, it is at best useless and at worst dangerous,” said Waddell, who’s been in the news business for 50 years. “In the newspaper business, that means that the role of publisher has to be locally based. Regardless of the size of the community, the publisher has to be local.”
“I’m talking about boots on the ground. I’m talking about local commitment.”
It’s hard to imagine a similar government commission or study in the U.S.
To be clear, though, almost all daily publishers have found them themselves forced to cut, given the cascading losses of their broken print business. The question is the degree to which they’ve cut. We’re not mourning the death of printed newspapers, but of all the reporting — pixels or paper — that’s been disappearing for a decade.
So who will bring us the news? Local TV is making an effort — and just starting to feel more intense digital competition in its advertising sales. Public radio amasses a large audience, but only offers significant local reporting at some of its larger metro stations.
Just last week, the internet exploded over Facebook’s role in spreading “fake news”.
The questions posed by this decline across the continent certainly aren’t new ones, but they now become more urgent:
Is local journalism a public good?
Can we entrust the local journalism business to private equity ownership?
What’s the role of Google and Facebook, whose digital ad duopoly has unmistakably caused great collateral damage to the press?
What are the models, new and legacy, that may propel us into the third decade of this difficult century?
Tomi Engdahl says:
New York Times:
German officials demand further action from Facebook against hate speech posts, after it took 48 hours and a social media outcry to remove an anti-semitic post
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/28/technology/facebook-germany-hate-speech-fake-news.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
New York Times:
Journalists generally say they can’t ignore Trump’s tweets and will apply the same news judgment they would use for any statement by a powerful leader
If Trump Tweets It, Is It News? A Quandary for the News Media
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/29/business/media/if-trump-tweets-it-is-it-news-a-quandary-for-the-news-media.html
As news organizations grapple with covering a commander in chief unlike any other, Mr. Trump’s Twitter account — a bully pulpit, propaganda weapon and attention magnet all rolled into one — has quickly emerged as a fresh journalistic challenge and a source of lively debate.
How to cover a president’s pronouncements when they are both provocative and maddeningly vague? Does an early-morning tweet amount to a planned shift in American policy? Should news outlets, as some readers argue, ignore clearly untrue tweets, rather than amplify falsehoods further?
In interviews on Tuesday, political editors and reporters said that, for now, they planned to apply the same news judgment they would apply to any statement by a powerful leader, even as some acknowledged that social media allows Mr. Trump to reduce complicated subjects to snappy, and sometimes misleading, slogans and sound bites.
“Media would be wise to stop hyper-coverage of Trump’s tweets — they distract, distort and debase,” Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation, said in a Twitter post on Tuesday.
“President-elect Trump has amassed an incredible social media following, one he used very effectively throughout the campaign to communicate his message,” Ms. Hicks said in an email. “He intends to continue utilizing this modern form of communication, while taking into account his new role and responsibilities may call for modified usage.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Guardian:
The Guardian has moved to HTTPS, partly to stop ISPs tracking what readers are reading, information the paper believes “may be used against them”
The Guardian has moved to HTTPS
https://www.theguardian.com/info/developer-blog/2016/nov/29/the-guardian-has-moved-to-https
Discover why and how the Guardian has moved to HTTPS, the secure version of the web protocol that helps to protect user privacy