I have written on journalism and media trends eariler few years ago. So it is time for update. What is the state of journalism and news publishing in 2017? NiemanLab’s predictions for 2017 are a good place to start thinking about what lies ahead for journalism. There, Matt Waite puts us in our place straight away by telling us that the people running the media are the problem.
There has been changes on tech publishing. In January 2017 International Data Group, the owner of PCWorld magazine and market researcher IDC, on Thursday said it was being acquired by China Oceanwide Holdings Group and IDG Capital, the investment management firm run by IDG China executive Hugo Shong. In 2016 Arrow bought EE Times, EDN, TechOnline and lots more from UBM.
Here are some article links and information bits on journalist and media in 2017:
Soothsayers’ guides to journalism in 2017 article take a look at journalism predictions and the value of this year’s predictions.
What Journalism Needs To Do Post-Election article tells that faced with the growing recognition that the electorate was uniformed or, at minimum, deeply in the thrall of fake news, far too many journalists are responding not with calls for change but by digging in deeper to exactly the kinds of practices that got us here in the first place.
Fake News Is About to Get Even Scarier than You Ever Dreamed article says that what we saw in the 2016 election is nothing compared to what we need to prepare for in 2020 as incipient technologies appear likely to soon obliterate the line between real and fake.
Headlines matter article tells that in 2017, headlines will matter more than ever and journalists will need to wrest control of headline writing from social-optimization teams. People get their news from headlines now in a way they never did in the past.
Why new journalism grads are optimistic about 2017 article tells that since today’s college journalism students have been in school, the forecasts for their futures has been filled with words like “layoffs,” “cutbacks,” “buyouts” and “freelance.” Still many people are optimistic about the future because the main motivation for being a journalist is often “to make a difference.”
Updating social media account can be a serious job. Zuckerberg has 12+ Facebook employees helping him with posts and comments on his Facebook page and professional photographers to snap personal moments.
Wikipedia Is Being Ripped Apart By a Witch Hunt For Secretly Paid Editors article tells that with undisclosed paid editing on the rise, Wikipedians and the Wikimedia Foundation are working together to stop the practice without discouraging user participation. Paid editing is permissible under Wikimedia Foundation’s terms of use as long as they disclose these conflicts of interest on their user pages, but not all paid editors make these disclosures.
Big Internet giants are working on how to make content better for mobile devices. Instant Articles is a new way for any publisher to create fast, interactive articles on Facebook. Google’s AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is a project that it aims to accelerate content on mobile devices. Both of those systems have their advantages and problems.
Clearing Out the App Stores: Government Censorship Made Easier article tells that there’s a new form of digital censorship sweeping the globe, and it could be the start of something devastating. The centralization of the internet via app stores has made government censorship easier. If the app isn’t in a country’s app store, it effectively doesn’t exist. For more than a decade, we users of digital devices have actively championed an online infrastructure that now looks uniquely vulnerable to the sanctions of despots and others who seek to control information.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
Hundreds of German universities set to lose access to Elsevier journals
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07817-1?utm_source=TWT_NatureNews&sf175360502=1
Negotiations to reduce journal prices and promote open access are progressing slowly.
Around 200 German universities will lose their subscriptions to Elsevier journals within weeks, because negotiations have failed to end a long-term contract dispute.
The conflict between Elsevier, the world’s biggest publisher of scientific journals, and Germany’s entire university system has dragged on since 2015.
Advocates of open-access publishing worldwide say that victory for the German universities would be a major blow to conventional models of scientific publishing based on subscription fees. Germany’s firm stand in the battle to reduce subscription prices and promote immediate open access could herald profound changes to the global landscape of scholarly publishing, they say.
Tomi Engdahl says:
EU urges internet companies to do more to remove extremist content
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-internet-forum/eu-urges-internet-companies-to-do-more-to-remove-extremist-content-idUSKBN1E02Q7
(Reuters) – Internet groups such as Facebook (FB.O), Google’s YouTube (GOOGL.O) and Twitter (TWTR.N) need to do more to stem the proliferation of extremist content on their platforms, the European Commission said after a meeting on Wednesday.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Lauren Etter / Bloomberg:
How Philippines’ President Duterte utilized Facebook, used by 97% of Filipino internet users, to spread his message before weaponizing it to target dissent — Rodrigo Duterte walked down the aisle of a packed auditorium at De La Salle University in downtown Manila, shaking hands and waving …
What Happens When the Government Uses Facebook as a Weapon?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-07/how-rodrigo-duterte-turned-facebook-into-a-weapon-with-a-little-help-from-facebook
It’s social media in the age of “patriotic trolling” in the Philippines, where the government is waging a campaign to destroy a critic—with a little help from Facebook itself.
The Philippines is prime Facebook country—smartphones outnumber people, and 97 percent of Filipinos who are online have Facebook accounts. Ressa’s forum introduced Duterte to Filipino millennials on the platform where they live. Duterte, a quick social media study despite being 71 at the time of the election, took it from there. He hired strategists who helped him transform his modest online presence, creating an army of Facebook personalities and bloggers worldwide. His large base of followers—enthusiastic and often vicious—was sometimes called the Duterte Die-Hard Supporters, or simply DDS. No one missed the reference to another DDS: Duterte’s infamous Davao Death Squad, widely thought to have killed hundreds of people.
“At the beginning I actually loved it because I felt like this was untapped potential,” Ressa says. “Duterte’s campaign on social media was groundbreaking.”
Until it became crushing. Since being elected in May 2016, Duterte has turned Facebook into a weapon. The same Facebook personalities who fought dirty to see Duterte win were brought inside the Malacañang Palace. From there they are methodically taking down opponents, including a prominent senator and human-rights activist who became the target of vicious online attacks and was ultimately jailed on a drug charge.
As the campaign for the 2016 Philippine presidential election got under way, Facebook began receiving inquiries from candidates on how they could best use the platform.
Armed with new knowledge, Duterte’s people constructed a social media apparatus unlike that of any other candidate in the race.
Facebook initially started receiving complaints about inauthentic pages. It seemed harmless enough—they supported a range of candidates, and most of them appeared to originate from zealous fans. Soon, however, there were complaints about Duterte’s Facebook army circulating aggressive messages, insults, and threats of violence. Then the campaign itself began circulating false information.
Duterte ended up dominating the political conversation so thoroughly that in April, a month before the vote, a Facebook report called him the “undisputed king of Facebook conversations.” He was the subject of 64 percent of all Philippine election-related conversations on the site.
After Duterte won, Facebook did what it does for governments all over the world—it began deepening its partnership with the new administration, offering white-glove services to help it maximize the platform’s potential and use best practices. Even as Duterte banned the independent press from covering his inauguration live from inside Rizal Ceremonial Hall, the new administration arranged for the event to be streamed on Facebook
But authoritarian regimes are now embracing social media, shaping the platforms into a tool to wage war against a wide range of opponents—opposition parties, human-rights activists, minority populations, journalists.
The phenomenon, sometimes referred to as “patriotic trolling,” involves the use of targeted harassment and propaganda meant to go viral and to give the impression that there is a groundswell of organic support for the government. Much of the trolling is carried out by true believers, but there is evidence that some governments, including Duterte’s, pay people to execute attacks against opponents. Trolls use all the social media platforms—including Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, in addition to the comments sections of news sites. But in the Philippines, Facebook is dominant.
Ressa exposed herself to this in September 2016, a little more than three months after the election. On a Friday night, a bomb ripped through a night market in Davao City, Duterte’s hometown, killing 14 and injuring dozens more. Within hours, Duterte implemented a nationwide state of emergency.
This, and another earlier incident, became the basis of the article that altered Ressa’s relationship with her government. She titled it “Propaganda War: Weaponizing the Internet.” Within hours of publication, she and Rappler were being attacked through Facebook. She began receiving rapid-fire hate messages. “Leave our country!!!! WHORE!!!!!!” read one.
“Either they’re negligent or they’re complicit in state-sponsored hate”
Even in the U.S., where Facebook has been hauled before Congress to explain its role in a Russian disinformation campaign designed to influence the U.S. presidential election, the company doesn’t have a clear answer for how it will stem abuse. It says it will add 10,000 workers worldwide to handle security issues, increase its use of third-party fact-checkers to identify fake news, and coordinate more closely with governments to find sources of misinformation and abuse. But the most challenging questions—such as what happens when the government itself is a bad actor and where to draw the line between free speech and a credible threat of violence—are beyond the scope of these fixes.
Facebook is inherently conflicted. It promises advertisers it will deliver interested and engaged users—and often what is interesting and engaging is salacious, aggressive, or simply false. “I don’t think you can underestimate how much of a role they play in societal discourse,”
Propaganda war: Weaponizing the internet
https://www.rappler.com/nation/148007-propaganda-war-weaponizing-internet
In the Philippines, paid trolls, fallacious reasoning, leaps in logic, poisoning the well – these are only some of the propaganda techniques that have helped shift public opinion on key issues
Tomi Engdahl says:
Catherine Shu / TechCrunch:
Patreon says it will reduce pledge fee from 5% to 2.9% but add a $0.35 charge for each individual pledge, causing concern among some creators — Patreon announced a new service fee policy that it says will help creators keep more money, but many are worried because they believe it will instead discourage their patrons from pledging.
Patreon’s new service fee spurs concern that creators will lose patrons [updated]
https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/07/patreons-new-service-fee-spurs-concern-that-creators-will-lose-patrons/
Update: After the negative reaction from Patreon creators, the company updated its blog post about the fee change with a more detailed explanation of how it will supposedly ease confusion over payments. Judging from the response on Twitter, however, many creators feel Patreon hasn’t adequately addressed how the changes will affect their patrons, who are, after all, the people pledging money.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Alex Kantrowitz / BuzzFeed:
Data from publishing tool SocialFlow says Twitter users are retweeting and liking tweets with over 140 characters almost twice as much as shorter ones — Given the deluge of complaints about Twitter’s 280-character limit when it debuted this fall, you’d think people would be ignoring the new, lengthier tweets.
Twitter Users Like Long Tweets More Than Short Ones
https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexkantrowitz/early-data-shows-longer-tweets-are-a-hit-with-twitters-users?utm_term=.rpMBE41aMX#.umJMVBkd3m
The early verdict is in: People are retweeting and liking longer tweets almost twice as much as shorter ones.
Given the deluge of complaints about Twitter’s 280-character limit when it debuted this fall, you’d think people would be ignoring the new, lengthier tweets.
But that doesn’t appear to be the case.
Early data shows tweets above 140 characters are being liked and retweeted at a rate approximately double that of their shorter counterparts. BuzzFeed News obtained the data from SocialFlow, a publishing tool used by approximately 300 major publishers including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Lucas Shaw / Bloomberg:
Many individual creators complain that YouTube’s demonetization of offensive content unfairly hit their video channels, severely impacting ad earnings
YouTube Advertising Crackdown Puts Some Creators Out of Work
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-08/youtube-advertising-crackdown-puts-some-creators-out-of-work
Algorithm flags offensive material but isn’t perfect
Site says it’s working to address YouTubers’ concerns
YouTube’s crackdown on inappropriate material is inadvertently depriving some creators of as much as 80 percent of their monthly sales, a blow to the very people who helped make the site the most popular place to watch video online.
The swift drop in revenue, a side effect of YouTube’s attempt to remove ads from offensive videos, has caused some users who once thrived on the site to quit posting or defect for rival sites like Amazon.com Inc.’s Twitch, according to interviews with a dozen different creators and partners.
The video service has built one of the largest media businesses in the world, with billions of dollars in annual revenue, by relying on relative unknowns to provide it with clips for free. The incentive for users is to build an audience and share in advertising proceeds as their viewership grows. But some creators are reconsidering as they benefit less from the symbiotic relationship.
YouTube has been stripping advertisements from hundreds of thousands of videos — a process it’s calling de-monetization — after reports in the Wall Street Journal and other outlets revealed ads had run next to inappropriate material.
De-monetization is supposed to assure those advertisers it’s safe to come back, but the process has also swept up all sorts of video that never should have been targeted.
“Anybody running a serious YouTube channel has seen a higher percentage of videos de-monetized and it doesn’t seem to be subsiding,” said Marc Hustvedt, the chief executive officer of Above Average, an online media company owned by “Saturday Night Live” producer Broadway Video. “Individual creators are taking the biggest hit. The swings are massive.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
The U.S. Media Yesterday Suffered its Most Humiliating Debacle in Ages: Now Refuses All Transparency Over What Happened
https://theintercept.com/2017/12/09/the-u-s-media-yesterday-suffered-its-most-humiliating-debacle-in-ages-now-refuses-all-transparency-over-what-happened/
FRIDAY WAS ONE of the most embarrassing days for the U.S. media in quite a long time. The humiliation orgy was kicked off by CNN, with MSNBC and CBS close behind
hyping an exclusive bombshell report that seemed to prove that WikiLeaks, last September, had secretly offered the Trump campaign, even Donald Trump himself, special access to the DNC emails before they were published
There was just one small problem with this story: it was fundamentally false, in the most embarrassing way possible. Hours after CNN broadcast its story – and then hyped it over and over and over – the Washington Post reported that CNN got the key fact of the story wrong.
The email was not dated September 4, as CNN claimed, but rather September 14 – which means it was sent after WikiLeaks had already published access to the DNC emails online.
How did CNN end up aggressively hyping such a spectacularly false story? They refuse to say.
CNN’s PR Department then claimed that “multiple sources” had provided CNN with the false date.
how did “multiple sources” all misread the date on this document, in exactly the same way
WHY DOES THIS MATTER SO MUCH? For so many significant reasons:
To begin with, it’s hard to overstate how fast, far and wide this false story traveled.
It’s hard to quantify exactly how many people were deceived
Surely anyone who has any minimal concerns about journalistic accuracy –
– would demand an accounting as to how a major U.S. media outlet ended up filling so many people’s brains with totally false news.
Second, the “multiple sources” who fed CNN this false information did not confine themselves to that network. They were apparently very busy eagerly spreading the false information to as many media outlets as they could find.
journalists should expose, rather than protect and conceal, sources who purposely feed them false information to be disseminated to the public
It is debacles like this – and the subsequent corporate efforts to obfuscate – that have made the U.S. media so disliked and that fuel and empower Trump’s attacks on them.
Third, this type of recklessness and falsity is now a clear and highly disturbing trend – one could say a constant – when it comes to reporting on Trump, Russia and WikiLeaks.
All media outlets, of course, will make mistakes.
Virtually every false story published goes only in one direction
when the U.S. media is spewing constant false news about all of this, that, too, is a grave threat to our democracy and cherished freedom.
Here is just a sample of incredibly inflammatory claims that traveled all over the internet before having to be corrected, walk-backed, or retracted – often long after the initial false claims spread, and where the corrections receive only a tiny fraction of the attention with which the initial false stories are lavished:
But journalists also have the responsibility not just to demand respect and credibility but to earn it. That means that there shouldn’t be such a long list of abject humiliations, in which completely false stories are published to plaudits, traffic and other rewards, only to fall apart upon minimal scrutiny.
Tomi Engdahl says:
This is the future if net neutrality is repealed; the creeping, costly death of media freedom
https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/09/this-is-the-future-if-net-neutrality-is-repealed-the-creeping-costly-death-of-media-freedom/?ncid=rss&utm_source=tcfbpage&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&sr_share=facebook
If you’re scared of a future America without net neutrality, I want to terrify you. The potential repeal of what should be a civic right should chill you to the bone. No, there is more than one future you should fear
When a country lacks an open internet, the government (and companies friendly with said government) are able to do anything from simply blocking or banning apps entirely (EG: Facebook, Twitter, Skype, WhatsApp for censorship or economic reasons) to more aggressive moves such as Egypt’s effective shutdown of their internet service providers.
As a lucky American, it’s easy to say “this can’t happen here,” which is a reasonable, human gesture — we live under a democracy, but said democracy also has polarized politics and a totally different lobbying system to the rest of the world. While we have freedom of speech, we also have billions of for-profit lobbyist dollars acting as a cudgel against our interests.
The Brain Drain
Finally, an internet that costs more to do less is simply less attractive to talent. The US already has restrictive immigration and a high cost of living – by making it a hostile environment for those that don’t appease the internet’s overlords, we’re rejecting the future geniuses of tomorrow.
When Netflix, Spotify and Amazon came along, they were plucky startups that large corporations didn’t think would bother them until it was too late. Now they border on utilities
Any company that threatens an entertainment product owned by NBC, or the voice or data services of AT&T, or begins to syphon talent from Time Warner’s HBO is at risk.
Tomi Engdahl says:
No one makes a living on Patreon
Who is really benefiting from the crowdfunding site for artists?
https://theoutline.com/post/2571/no-one-makes-a-living-on-patreon
2%
The percentage of Patreon creators who earn more than the federal minimum wage through the site, according to public earnings data.
I decided to take a shot at Patreon, a crowdfunding site that encourages artists to “regain creative freedom” by raising money directly from fans. I knew friends had made Patreon accounts over the years, selling their art and music, funding their writing and podcasts, and figured if I could make $400 to $500 a month, I could continue doing photography full time.
Patreon is basically a payments processor designed like a social network. Every creator sets up a profile where they fill out a prompt about what they’re making: “Oliver Babish is creating cooking videos,” or “Hannah Alexander is creating Art and Costume Designs inspired by pop culture and Art Nouveau.” Patreon encourages creators to provide a description of themselves and their work and strongly suggests uploading a video
When Jack Conte, a former YouTube musician, and Sam Yam, a co-founder of the mobile ad platform AdWhirl, launched Patreon in 2013, Conte posted a video he had made for an original song called “Pedals.” The video cost him $10,000 and three months to make and got nearly 2 million views, he said, but he made just $963 through YouTube’s ad network. “This devaluing of art and creators is happening at a global scale,” Conte wrote in a blog post on Patreon. “It actually makes my heart sink when I think of the magnitude of the web’s systemic abuse of creative people.”
But despite the revolutionary rhetoric, the success stories, and the goodwill that Patreon has generated, the numbers tell a different story.
“Finally, ‘starving’ and ‘artist’ no longer need to be joined at the hip,” according to Patreon, in one of its many positive blog posts about its successful creators. But Patreon seems to know that most of its creators are actually making a pittance. In 2016, Patreon boasted that 7,960 users were now making over $100 a month, which struck me as such an insignificant monthly income to brag about. Around the same time, the company reportedly had 25,000 creators, meaning only 31 percent of Patreon’s users were making over a hundred bucks.
Traditionally, patronage depended on the benevolence of aristocrats, who would donate money to the artists whose works they enjoyed. Patronage has existed anywhere a rich, upper class controls most of the wealth and resources, from feudal Japan to Europe’s Renaissance.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Julie Zauzmer / Washington Post:
A look at motivations of journalism students at evangelical Christian college Liberty University as the industry faces derision from some on the religious right — LYNCHBURG, Va. — What do you do when everyone around you thinks the media is “fake news” — and you want to work for the media?
Their family and friends call the media ‘fake news.’ But these students want to be journalists.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2017/12/08/at-liberty-university-some-see-fake-news-some-want-to-become-journalists/?utm_term=.49db09dd4603
What do you do when everyone around you thinks the media is “fake news” — and you want to work for the media?
That’s the question professor Amy Bonebright needs to help her students answer. This is Liberty University, the world’s largest evangelical Christian school. Most students come from politically and religiously conservative families and churches inclined not to trust the news — and, indeed, the president of the university is Jerry Falwell Jr., a fervent advocate for President Trump, who throws around the term “fake news” to refer to most mainstream media reporting.
So when Bonebright teaches a room full of aspiring reporters in her “Community Journalism” class, she needs to teach them more than just how to craft a lede and conduct an interview. “Now, everyone’s down on the media,” she says to her class. “Maybe you go home over break and see your parents’ friends. And they say, ‘Remind me what you’re studying.’”
A nervous giggle rises from many of the students. They have had that conversation before.
“You say journalism, and they go, ‘Hmm,’”
“As Christians, we believe in truth,” senior Timothy Cockes raises his hand to say. “Christians actually should be the best journalists there are, because we believe there is truth out there.”
Newsrooms aren’t known as very religious places.
studies on the subject (conducted in 1992) found 90 percent of journalists were raised in religious homes but only 38 percent described religion as “very important” to them as adults, compared with 61 percent of Americans overall.
“I had a student a couple years ago who interned at CNN. You know CNN’s reputation has really gone down the toilet,” he said. He thinks that a diversity of voices in editorial meetings would improve the channel’s coverage, and his student could someday provide that. “Some of these claims of ‘fake news’? If there were more people who were questioning and challenging, I suspect some of that ‘fake news’ would go out the door.”
All of the students say again and again they’re committed to objectively airing all sides of a debate — the ethics at the heart of any journalism, religious or not — even though most of them have strong views about political and moral issues.
“We believe the truth is so powerful [that] we’re not afraid to share the other side [that] we believe is wrong,” Bonebright puts it.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Daniel Funke / Poynter:
Irish lawmakers propose bill criminalizing use of bots to influence politics, and the “active promotion” of fake news, with five years jail or fines up to €10K — If you use a Twitter bot or share fake news in Ireland, go directly to jail, do not pass go and possibly pay €10,000.
In Ireland, lawmakers are trying to criminalize sharing fake news
https://www.poynter.org/news/ireland-lawmakers-are-trying-criminalize-sharing-fake-news
If you use a Twitter bot or share fake news in Ireland, go directly to jail, do not pass go and possibly pay €10,000.
That’s the spirit of a bill Irish lawmakers proposed this week, which would make using a bot to influence political debate a criminal offense, punishable by five years in prison or fines of up to €10,000. It would also make it illegal to “actively promote” fake news using social media platforms like Facebook.
“Section 6 goes much further than the U.S. bills, and reflects an unfortunate tendency amongst Irish backbenchers to reach for the criminal law when they don’t like the internet,” O’Dell said.
Following contentious elections and referenda in France, Italy and the United Kingdom that were marred by misinformation, the EU Commission has created a high-level group to figure out how to best address fake news online. But experts in the EU and elsewhere are doubtful that it will accomplish anything significant due to governance problems, and proposed solutions focus on issues like hate speech and advertising rather than misinformation.
Since the Irish parliament has shown willingness to legislate against freedom of expression in the past, she said this new proposed law comes as no surprise. And, if passed, it could backfire.
“This will be perceived from the user as an infringement on their freedom of expression,” she said. “I agree with the implied intention of this legislation to maybe detoxify, maybe safeguard the public sphere from those who have malicious intent, but on the other hand we have to make sure citizens aren’t penalized for their right to freedom of expression.”
There are other problems with the bill. Siapera said the legislation hinges on a definition of fake news, which is “contentious and ill-defined” at best.
the bill is trying to solve a phantom problem.
“The first thing to know here is that — somewhat remarkably — there is no real ‘fake news’ to speak of in Ireland,”
That doesn’t mean Ireland is immune to fake news.
Regardless of intent, the proposal’s enforceability is questionable.
“Journalists are really reticent to pursue investigative reports because of the law. If now fake news is brought into the picture, it’s going to overcomplicate things, in my opinion,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
GUILT TALKING
Former Facebook executive has sworn off social media because he doesn’t want to be “programmed”
https://qz.com/1153007/former-facebook-executive-chamath-palihapitiya-you-dont-realize-it-but-you-are-being-programmed/
While Facebook’s business is booming and the company continues to expand its tentacles to every corner of the internet, its early employees and investors are growing more and more vocal about the damage it has wrought among its users.
Former Facebook vice president of user growth Chamath Palihapitiya said that social media is “eroding the core foundations of how people behave” and that he feels “tremendous guilt” about creating tools that are “ripping apart the social fabric.”
During a talk at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in November, Palihapitiya echoed the words of other Facebook dissenters who have recently taken their guilt and grievances public.
Former Facebook exec says social media is ripping apart society
‘No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth.’
https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/11/16761016/former-facebook-exec-ripping-apart-society
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook responds to former exec who feels ‘tremendous guilt’ for what he helped make
http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-responds-chamath-palihapitiya-criticism-social-media-2017-12?r=US&IR=T&IR=T
Facebook has responded to recent comments made by a former executive that criticized the company.
Facebook says it takes responsibility for how its platform is used and “was a very different company” when the executive, Chamath Palihapitiya, worked there.
A Facebook representative has responded to recent critical comments made by a former executive, Chamath Palihapitiya, saying Facebook “was a very different company” during the period he worked there.
Palihapitiya spoke at Stanford’s business school last month and had harsh words for his former employer, saying Facebook and other social networks “are destroying how society works.” He also implied that early Facebook employees didn’t do enough to stem “unforeseen consequences” of abuse on the platform.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Twitter says Russians spent ~$1k on six Brexit-related ads
https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/13/twitter-says-russians-spent-1k-on-six-brexit-related-ads/?ncid=rss&utm_source=tcfbpage&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=FaceBook&sr_share=facebook
Twitter has disclosed that Russian-backed accounts spent $1,031.99 to buy six Brexit-related ads on its platform during last year’s European Union referendum vote.
This nugget of intel into Kremlin political disinformation ops that were centered on the UK’s Brexit
Earlier today Facebook said it had identified three “immigration” ads bought by Russian backed accounts that ran ahead of the Brexit vote — which it says garnered 200 views.
However Facebook’s probe has so far only looked at paid content from Russian accounts. So it’s still not clear how much Brexit-related propaganda was being spread by Russian accounts on the platform given that content can also be freely shared with followers on Facebook.
In the US Kremlin agents were even revealed to have used Facebook’s Events tools to list and orchestrate real-world meet-ups.
And in October, Facebook admitted as many as 126 million US Facebook users could have viewed Russian-backed content on its platform.
An academic study last month suggested substantial activity on that front — tracking more than 150,000 Russian accounts that mentioned Brexit and some 45,000 tweets posted in the 48 hours around the vote.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The difference between good and bad Facebooking
https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/14/active-vs-passive-social-media/
“Social media” is a clumsy term that entangles enriching social interaction with mindless media consumption.
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The difference between good and bad Facebooking
Posted 3 hours ago by Josh Constine (@joshconstine)
The difference between good and bad Facebooking
“Social media” is a clumsy term that entangles enriching social interaction with mindless media consumption. It’s a double-edged sword whose sides aren’t properly distinguished. Taken as a whole, we can’t decide if it “brings the world closer together” like Facebook’s new mission statement says, or leaves us depressed and isolated. It does both, but our opportunity and the tech giants’ responsibility is to shift usage toward “time well spent.”
Thankfully, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg seems ready to embrace that responsibility. “Time spent is not a goal by itself. We want the time people spend on Facebook to encourage meaningful social interactions,” he said on its most recent earnings call.
It’s not just a Facebook issue. Notification-spamming mobile app developers, video platforms like Netflix and YouTube and video games from Candy Crush to Call of Duty need to wake up to how their design choices can squander our attention and stifle our sanity.
Facebook is the perfect trap for our attention, especially when our will is weak. Algorithmically sorted feeds bring the best content to you with no effort, a simple click lets you dole out a Like
For years, Facebook tried to highlight research showing it brought people out of filter bubbles and helped them score jobs.
“Our experimental manipulation led people in the passive Facebook usage condition to feel approximately 9% worse at the end of the day compared with baseline. In Study 2, intense passive Facebook usage predicted a 5% decrease in affective well-being over time” the study shows. It also worryingly found that people spent significantly more time passively Facebooking.
Facebook users can even exhibit a “self-promotion – envy spiral” where they increasingly adopt narcissistic behaviors and glorify their lives in an attempt to compete with the rest of their social graph.
The scientists aren’t the only ones convinced Facebook can have a negative influence on our lives. Former employees and industry pundits are speaking up, too.
We’ve reached the dawn of an era of reckoning with the unintended consequences of technology. The fake news scandals and Russian interference surrounding the 2016 U.S. presidential election have landed Facebook, along with Twitter and Google, in the hotseats of congressional hearings.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Kurt Wagner / Recode:
Facebook is clamping down on “engagement bait”, posts that ask people for Likes or shares, by demoting them in the News Feed
Facebook is clamping down on posts that ask people for Likes or shares
Facebook has identified a new kind of spam: Engagement baiting.
https://www.recode.net/2017/12/18/16785250/facebook-news-feed-change-spam-engagement-baiting-publishers
Facebook is cracking down on a new type of clickbait: Posts that ask people to Like or share or comment to goose engagement numbers, what Facebook is calling “engagement bait.”
You’ve probably seen posts like this in your feed before. Like if you think cats are best. Share if you think dogs are best. It’s a tactic that publishers will use to game Facebook’s algorithm, which rewards posts that get better engagement and shows them to more people.
Facebook has decided it doesn’t like publishers gaming the system this way, and claims users don’t like it either. “People have told us that they dislike spammy posts on Facebook that goad them into interacting with likes, shares, comments, and other actions,” the company wrote on its blog.
So starting Monday, posts that Facebook considers to be engagement bait will be pushed down in News Feed. Beginning in a few weeks, publishers and Pages that continue to utilize this tactic will see their reach diminished for all of their posts.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Rachel Abrams / New York Times:
Journalist documents her frustrating quest to fix an error in the Knowledge Graph panel appearing on Google searches for her name, which claimed she was dead — I’m not dead yet. — But try telling that to Google. — For much of the last week, I have been trying to persuade the world’s …
Google Thinks I’m Dead
(I know otherwise.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/business/google-thinks-im-dead.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jonah Engel Bromwich / New York Times:
Profiles of three current and one former volunteer moderator of KnowYourMeme, a Brooklyn-based website explaining the internet’s inside jokes
Life on the Meme Council: Meet the Internet’s Gatekeepers
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/15/style/know-your-meme.html
Social networks produce inside jokes at a relentless pace. The best, worst, stupidest and funniest of those jokes become memes, and either you get them or you don’t.
But if you don’t and, like me, you’re a sad nerd desperate to understand the gags you’re missing, there’s a site dedicated to helping.
Over the past several years, the website KnowYourMeme has become what Wikipedia is to information or UrbanDictionary is to esoteric sex acts. The site is a mostly reliable, crowdsourced translator of the internet’s inside jokes.
The site has a home page but, like Wikipedia, it is chiefly useful when looking up specific entries. It is amazingly comprehensive, given that it is run by a skeleton team of six writers and one developer out of a small office in Brooklyn
http://knowyourmeme.com/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Twitter suspends Britain First leaders
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42402570
Twitter has suspended the accounts of two leaders of a British far-right group shortly after revising its rules on hate speech.
Paul Golding, Britain First’s leader, and Jayda Fransen, his deputy, can no longer tweet and their past posts no longer appear.
The organisation’s official Twitter page has suffered the same fate.
It appears that three of Ms Fransen’s posts that President Trump retweeted have gone from his feed as a result.
The messages had featured anti-Muslim videos and proved highly controversial when the American leader shared them in November.
Twitter bans Britain First leaders after anti-Muslim videos shared by Donald Trump
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/12/18/twitter-bans-britain-first-account-whose-anti-muslim-videos/
Twitter has suspended Jayda Fransen, the deputy leader of far-right group Britain First, whose anti-Muslim videos caused a diplomatic storm when they were shared by Donald Trump last month.
Fransen’s account was banned on Monday along with a number of other far-right individuals as the social media company introduced a new policy on hate speech.
The official Britain First Twitter account, that of its leader Paul Golding, the American white nationalist Jared Taylor and the American Nazi party were also suspended in a major crackdown. Twitter has been repeatedly criticised for failing to deal with abuse and hate speech online, but has vowed to do more in recent months.
The incident threatened to imperil US-UK relations when Mr Trump then hit back at the Prime Minister. “Theresa, don’t focus on me, focus on the destructive Radical Islamic Terrorism that is taking place within the United Kingdom. We are doing just fine!” he wrote at the time.
Suspending an account means all of their tweets are deleted. The profile itself is no longer available and the retweets no longer show up on Trump’s timeline.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Twitter starts enforcing new policies on violence, abuse, and hateful conduct
Policies now extend to hateful imagery and to conduct both on platform and off
https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/18/16789606/twitter-new-safety-policies-hate-groups
Twitter says it will now begin enforcing the new rules it announced last month to combat abuse and hateful conduct, including threats of violence and physical harm. The new rules expand policies to abusive or threatening content in usernames and profiles, and to accounts affiliated with hate groups both on and off platform.
Twitter has struggled with violent, offensive, or hateful content, even granting verification badges before removing them from prominent white nationalists as hate speech and abuse have proliferated on the platform. Twitter has also been criticized for the seemingly arbitrary way it enforces its rules and has previously said it plans to do a better job of responding to users’ reports of abuse.
Under Twitter’s policies, specific threats of violence, death, or disease to an individual or a group of people was already considered a violation. The new rules will apply to accounts including those that affiliate themselves with organizations that “use or promote violence against civilians to further their causes.”
https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/931552531167166469
Tomi Engdahl says:
Russia meddled on Twitter after UK terror attacks, study says
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42393540
Suspected Russia-linked Twitter accounts were used to “extend the impact and harm” of four 2017 terrorist attacks in the UK, a study says.
Cardiff University researchers have found hundreds of related messages in 47 accounts previously tied to Russia.
Some posts were anti-Muslim in nature, while others were critical of those who held such views, they report.
Moscow has not commented but has denied past claims it sought to meddle in Western democracies via social media.
Even so, one influential MP has condemned the activity.
“It is wrong that any organisation should spread disinformation following a terrorist attack, with the purpose of spreading hatred and making worse an already desperate and confusing situation,” Damian Collins, chair of the digital, culture, media and sport select committee, told the BBC.
“The methods of organisations such as the Russian-backed Internet Research Agency are becoming increasingly clear. Through our inquiry into fake news, I am determined that they should be exposed.”
The researchers then determined that after:
March’s attack at Westminster Bridge, 35 relevant original messages had been posted by the accounts
May’s pop concert attack in Manchester, 293 messages had been posted
June’s London Bridge attack, 140 messages had been posted
June’s Finsbury Park attack, seven messages had been posted
This tally of 475 messages were reposted more than 153,000 times in total by others, the researchers determined.
Examples included: “Another day, another Muslim terrorist attack. Retweet if you think that Islam needs to be banned!”
“The evidence suggests a systematic strategic political communications campaign being directed at the UK designed to amplify the public harms of terrorist attacks,” concluded the authors.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Kremlin’s New Cyber Weapons Spark Fears and Fantasies
http://www.securityweek.com/kremlins-new-cyber-weapons-spark-fears-and-fantasies
From Donald Trump’s election to Brexit and the Catalan crisis, accusations that the Kremlin is meddling in Western domestic affairs have heightened fears over Russian hackers, trolls and state-controlled media.
While the first accusations against Moscow came following a 2016 hack attack on the US Democratic Party’s servers, they rapidly multiplied after Trump’s election, revealing a whole range of tools used by the Kremlin to serve its interests.
Fears initially centred on mysterious Russian hackers who supposedly worked for Moscow’s security services as part of a cyber war but then shifted to a flood of online articles and social media posts aiming to explain Moscow’s position and play up the failings of Western democracies.
In the latest episode of the saga that is dominating Trump’s presidency, Russian state television channel RT, accused of broadcasting Kremlin propaganda abroad, complied with Washington demands in November to register as a “foreign agent” in the US.
A few weeks earlier, social media giant Twitter announced it would stop distributing content sponsored by RT and linked news agency Sputnik while Facebook and Google promised to do more to fight Moscow’s “disinformation”.
Panic has spread across the Western world: Madrid is worried about Russian-controlled “manipulation” of the Catalan crisis, while British analysts see signs of Russian influence in the Brexit vote and concerns are growing in Germany and France over possible interference in various polls.
- ‘Information war’ -
The Kremlin, meanwhile, has dismissed the accusations as “hysterical” and “Russophobic,” insisting there is no hard evidence for any of the charges.
- Limited means -
But Mark Galeotti, a security expert and researcher at the Institute of International Relations in Prague, wrote in Tablet magazine in June that the Kremlin’s operation in 2016 “was about weakening Washington, not deciding who would sit in the White House” and aimed to “undermine the legitimacy of the American government, its capacity to act”.
Despite these efforts, Moscow’s ability to influence Western public opinion remains limited.
Russia spent $50,000 on Facebook ads during the US election campaign compared to the whopping $81 million that Trump and Hillary Clinton spent on their campaigns.
Russian hackers, the Kremlin’s shadiest instruments, have been accused of targeting the US Democratic Party, the US National Security Agency, the party of France’s Emmanuel Macron and the World Anti-Doping Agency.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The rotten tomatoes audience score for Episode VIII is only 55 %. Even though the film has divided moviegoers, this score is way below what it should be – and it seems someone created a bot army to get the score lower.
A rabid Star Wars fan may have rigged the Rotten Tomatoes score for “The Last Jedi”
https://qz.com/1160551/the-rotten-tomatoes-score-for-the-last-jedi-may-be-rigged/
Critics on Rotten Tomatoes love The Last Jedi. Audiences seem thoroughly unimpressed.
lowly 55% with audiences who submitted more than 116,000 user
One angry, anti-Disney Star Wars fan is proudly claiming the credit for the disconnect. An anonymous individual who runs the Facebook page “Down With Disney’s Treatment of Franchises and its Fanboys” claims to have used bots to create fake Facebook accounts that logged into Rotten Tomatoes and posted negative reviews of the film to lower the audience score.
Rotten Tomatoes uses reCAPTCHA, a free API developed by Google that distinguishes humans from bots with a check of a box, to ensure that new signups are humans. But the site also has an option to sign up with Facebook, which bypasses that system. Once logged in, users can rate the movie by marking it “want to see” or “not interested,” scoring it on a scale of 0.5 to 5 stars, and posting a written review with the score. “Down with Disney” wrote on Facebook that it used Facebook accounts to login into Rotten Tomatoes and manipulate the score
The poor review allegedly generated by the bot may have exposed another problem with Rotten Tomatoes’s method of review aggregation. The system’s main score has been slammed for its reductive methodology, which doesn’t weigh reviews from respected critics higher than others, or account for nuance in criticism. This month, it was manipulated to ruin coming-of-age dramedy Lady Bird‘s perfect score.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Russia-Linked Twitter Accounts ‘Tried To Divide UK’ After Terrorist Attacks
https://news.slashdot.org/story/17/12/19/228242/russia-linked-twitter-accounts-tried-to-divide-uk-after-terrorist-attacks
Fake social media accounts linked to Russia were used to influence and interfere with public debate in the aftermath of four terrorist attacks in the UK this year, researchers have found. At least 47 Russian Twitter accounts posted material after attacks at Westminster Bridge, Manchester Arena, London Bridge and Finsbury Park, according to researchers at the Cardiff University Crime and Security Research Institute (CSRI). Of the 47 accounts, eight were especially active, posting at least 475 tweets about the four attacks, which were reposted more than 153,000 times.
Russia-linked Twitter accounts ‘tried to divide UK’ after terrorist attacks
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/dec/18/russia-linked-twitter-accounts-tried-to-divide-uk-after-terrorist-attacks
University researchers find at least 47 accounts that posted at least 475 messages, reposted more than 153,000 times
Tomi Engdahl says:
Elon Musk accidentally shared his personal phone number with 16M followers
https://thenextweb.com/shareables/2017/12/20/elon-musk-accidentally-shared-personal-phone-number-16m-followers/
There’s two golden rules of privacy on social media:
Don’t accidentally paste a password into a public message
Don’t share your phone number if you’re in any sort of position of prominence
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google Chrome ad-blocking to begin in February – but what is it going to block?
Don’t expect the adpocalypse
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/12/20/google_ad_blocking_yes_but_what/
From February 15, Google’s Chrome browser will begin zapping ads that don’t conform with new taste guidelines. But what those guidelines mean exactly is anyone’s guess.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Breaking News: President Niinistö slams publication of top secret documents by HS
http://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/15205-breaking-news-president-niinistoe-slams-publication-of-top-secret-documents-by-hs.html
the office of Finland’s President Sauli Niinistö slams the publication of top secret documents by Finland’s largest daily, Helsingin Sanomat. “Secret documents have been handed over to Helsingin Sanomat. A criminal investigation has been initiated on that.” says the brief statement. “Exposing the content of highly classified documents is critical to our security and could result in serious damage”
Cybersecurity professor questions use of secret documents in intelligence article
http://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/15209-cybersecurity-professor-questions-use-of-secret-documents-in-intelligence-article.html
Helsingin Sanomat may not have been able to sufficiently evaluate the importance of the classified information it used in an article about the Finnish Defence Intelligence Agency (VKoeL) on Saturday, says a professor of cybersecurity at Aalto University.
Helsingin Sanomat was ill-advised to publish an article based on classified documents that sheds light on the operations of the Finnish Defence Intelligence Agency (VKoeL), says Jarno Limnéll, a professor of cybersecurity at Aalto University.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google will turn on native ad-blocking in Chrome on February 15
https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/19/google-will-turn-on-native-ad-blocking-in-chrome-on-february-15/?utm_source=tcfbpage&sr_share=facebook
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook is scrapping its system of flagging fake news because it had ‘the opposite effect to what we intended’
http://nordic.businessinsider.com/facebook-drop-disputed-flags-fake-news-2017-12?r=US&IR=T
Facebook has been trying to combat the spread of misinformation on its platform through measures like putting a “Disputed” flag next to fake news.
The company will ditch this particular measure after finding this can actually entrench people more strongly in wrongly held beliefs.
The social media firm will stick to pointing people who read or share fake news to fact-checked, contextual articles.
Stopping people from reading fake news is proving tougher than expected, Facebook has admitted.
The company is ditching one of its original measures to tackle the spread of fake news on Facebook, which was to stick the word “disputed” next to misleading information.
But the tactic didn’t design for human pigheadedness where, when you tell someone their opinion is wrong, they simply entrench further in that opinion.
Facebook wrote in two explanatory blog posts that it would drop the “disputed” tag and provide contextual information next to fake news through its existing “Related articles” feature.
“Academic research on correcting misinformation has shown that putting a strong image, like a red flag, next to an article may actually entrench deeply held beliefs – the opposite effect to what we intended.”
In a separate Medium post, the three Facebook staffers leading the firm’s efforts against fake news wrote that giving people more context meant they shared less fake news. Unfortunately, neither the disputed tags or the additional context stopped people from actually clicking on fake news.
The trio cited academic research which shows giving context to fake news helped “reduce misperceptions.”
Facebook will still use some other tactics it was trialling: It will still use fact-checkers to determine the accuracy of articles, reduce the distribution of fake news, and send alerts to people who have shared disputed stories with extra context.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Check now to see if you liked any Russian troll accounts on Facebook
https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/22/check-now-to-see-if-you-liked-any-russian-troll-accounts-on-facebook/?ncid=rss&utm_source=tcfbpage&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&sr_share=facebook
This fall saw ever-rising estimates of the number of people reached by Russian-backed troll accounts — just shy of 150 million at last count . Now the social network has at last released the tool it promised last month allowing users to see if they liked or followed one of the many pages or pieces of content put online during the sketchy attempt at mass manipulation.
https://m.facebook.com/help/817246628445509
Tomi Engdahl says:
How Facebook’s Political Unit Enables the Dark Art of Digital Propaganda
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-21/inside-the-facebook-team-helping-regimes-that-reach-out-and-crack-down?utm_source=digg&utm_medium=email
Some of unit’s clients stifle opposition, stoke extremism.
Under fire for Facebook Inc.’s role as a platform for political propaganda, co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has punched back, saying his mission is above partisanship. “We hope to give all people a voice and create a platform for all ideas,” Zuckerberg wrote in September after President Donald Trump accused Facebook of bias.
Zuckerberg’s social network is a politically agnostic tool for its more than 2 billion users, he has said. But Facebook, it turns out, is no bystander in global politics. What he hasn’t said is that his company actively works with political parties and leaders
Tomi Engdahl says:
Washington Post:
Sources: years after FBI began tracking Russian disinformation efforts and US intelligence agencies drew up counter operations, the US still equivocates — The first email arrived in the inbox of CounterPunch, a left-leaning American news and opinion website, at 3:26 a.m. — the middle of the day in Moscow.
Kremlin trolls burned across the Internet as Washington debated options
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/kremlin-trolls-burned-across-the-internet-as-washington-debated-options/2017/12/23/e7b9dc92-e403-11e7-ab50-621fe0588340_story.html?utm_term=.e22e28888e3e
The first email arrived in the inbox of CounterPunch, a left-leaning American news and opinion website, at 3:26 a.m. — the middle of the day in Moscow.
“Hello, my name is Alice Donovan and I’m a beginner freelance journalist,” read the Feb. 26, 2016, message.
The FBI was tracking Donovan as part of a months-long counterintelligence operation code-named “NorthernNight.” Internal bureau reports described her as a pseudonymous foot soldier in an army of Kremlin-led trolls seeking to undermine America’s democratic institutions.
Her first articles as a freelancer for CounterPunch and at least 10 other online publications weren’t especially political. As the 2016 presidential election heated up, Donovan’s message shifted. Increasingly, she seemed to be doing the Kremlin’s bidding by stoking discontent toward Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton and touting WikiLeaks, which U.S. officials say was a tool of Russia’s broad influence operation to affect the presidential race.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Lizzie Plaugic / The Verge:
US Library of Congress will no longer archive the text of every tweet, will instead archive tweets on a “very selective basis”; the archive has yet to go online
The Library of Congress will no longer archive every tweet
https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/26/16819748/library-of-congress-twitter-archive-project-stalled
The Library of Congress just announced some changes to its long-running plan to archive all of Twitter. On December 31st, 2017, it will stop archiving all tweets and instead choose certain tweets to archive on a “very selective basis,” Gizmodo reports. The decision was announced in a recently published white paper that reads “the tweets collected and archived will be thematic and event-based, including events such as elections, or themes of ongoing national interest, e.g. public policy.”
The LOC first announced its plans to create a single searchable archive of every public tweet more than seven years ago, but the project has stalled for a few years. In 2013, the organization published a white paper attributing the delay to budget issues and a lack of software. Twitter’s terms of agreement also prohibits “substantial proportions” of its website from being made downloadable.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ben Popper / The Verge:
In 2017, YouTube’s business grew while its public image suffered after lacking protections against hate speech and disturbing kids’ videos
https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/22/16805410/youtube-business-scandals-best-worst-year
Tomi Engdahl says:
Washington Post:
Sources: years after FBI began tracking Russian disinformation efforts and US intelligence agencies drew up counter operations, the US still equivocates — The first email arrived in the inbox of CounterPunch, a left-leaning American news and opinion website, at 3:26 a.m. — the middle of the day in Moscow.
Kremlin trolls burned across the Internet as Washington debated options
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/kremlin-trolls-burned-across-the-internet-as-washington-debated-options/2017/12/23/e7b9dc92-e403-11e7-ab50-621fe0588340_story.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Lizzie Plaugic / The Verge:
US Library of Congress will no longer archive the text of every tweet, will instead archive tweets on a “very selective basis”; the archive has yet to go online — The Library of Congress just announced some changes to its long-running plan to archive all of Twitter.
The Library of Congress will no longer archive every tweet
https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/26/16819748/library-of-congress-twitter-archive-project-stalled
Tomi Engdahl says:
Pete Vernon / Columbia Journalism Review:
The year in US journalism: the big players, best feuds, media trends, and more
The year in journalism: The big players, best feuds, and more
A guide to what happened in the mediaverse in 2017
https://www.cjr.org/special_report/2017-journalism-awards-feuds-trends.php
It was a year dominated by a focus on our press-bashing president, when the scoops and push alerts threw the news cycle into overdrive. It was a year that saw continued financial challenges, and it ends with the industry in the midst of a reckoning in which it is both pushing the story forward and turning the lens on itself. As 2017 comes to a close, here are CJR’s awards, trends, players, feuds, and loose ends from the year that was
The rise and fall of the pro-Trump press
#MeToo #MeToo #MeToo
The year we dreaded glancing at our phones
This was the year that news flew so fast that the time it took to click a link or unlock our phone meant we were already behind.
Winter arrives for digital media
This was the year in which investors realized there may be no pot of gold at the end of the digital-media rainbow. BuzzFeed and Vice are both expected to miss their revenue targets by significant amounts, and Mashable was sold for a fraction of the value it was pegged at just a year ago.
Pivot to Video: 2017-2017
“Pivot to video” was 2017’s hottest media trend, with outlets like Mic, MTV News, Mashable, and Vice embracing the strategy, laying off dozens of written-word journalists in the process. The strategy resulted in traffic plunges and flat-out bad journalism, as the cost of doing what Facebook and advertisers want became clear.
A long wind-down for alt weeklies
With the possible exception of local newspapers, no medium has been hit harder by journalism’s financial reckoning than alternative weeklies.
More empty promises on diversity
The great media freakout
With public trust cratering, a president on the offensive, and an election coverage failure fresh in their minds, journalists embraced a tried and true practice this year: lots and lots of panels. Events featuring hand-wringing and pearl-clutching over fake news, media literacy, and broken norms, and an antagonistic administration peppered the calendar.
What, exactly, would they have to do to lose viewers?
The media’s digital navigators
The fracturing of the traditional media universe has left many disoriented in their attempts to understand how people get their news.
“I am not a media company”
This was the year Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg grudgingly admitted that his creation was more than a neutral platform, accepting the barest minimum level of responsibility for the influence his product had on the 2016 election, the sharing of fake news, and the sorry state of newspaper budgets.
“Yellow” journalism
The opening shot in the “fake news” wars
The last great newspaper war
Amidst a hypercharged news cycle and a rapidly transforming media marketplace, two legacy outlets led the way. Dean Baquet’s New York Times and Marty Baron’s Washington Post have dominated the field.
The late-night resistance
No longer a refuge from real life, most late-night hosts on network, cable, and premium TV took sides.
“I’m not against unions, but…”
Staffers at left-leaning digital media shops—from BuzzFeed to Slate to Vox—got the cold shoulder from management in their attempts to unionize.
Most apocalyptic newspaper slogan
These are rough times for journalism, but The Washington Post’s “Democracy Dies in Darkness” leans heavy on the melodrama.
Nazis, they’re just like us
Coverage of those holding extremist views can be difficult, but was increasingly necessary in 2017.
Donald Trump’s media diet
worrying is the four to eight hours of cable news and reading habits that have to be monitored by his chief of staff
Best example that the news cycle has gone off the rails
Because it’s 2017, and because it came from Donald Trump’s Twitter account, “covfefe” was actually a major news story for about half a day.
None of this matters because we’re all going to die
That was the message of David Wallace Wells’s New York magazine feature that dropped a month after President Trump announced that the US would be withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement.
The worst year on record for jailed journalists
With 262 journalists jailed worldwide, the Committee to Protect Journalists lambasted “the US and other Western powers” for failing
Why is no one watching the watchers?
Tomi Engdahl says:
Margaret Sullivan / Washington Post:
As attacks on the “mainstream media” increase, referring to it as the “reality-based press” is apt because journalism’s job is to dig out the facts — (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post) — On Jan. 22, Kellyanne Conwaydefended the president’s order that Sean Spicer …
Why I started saying ‘reality-based press’ in 2017, instead of ‘mainstream media’
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/why-i-started-saying-reality-based-press-in-2017-instead-of-mainstream-media/2017/12/21/33b7f9e0-e66a-11e7-833f-155031558ff4_story.html
On Jan. 22, Kellyanne Conway defended the president’s order that Sean Spicer, in his first appearance before the White House press corps, should feed reporters a whopping lie.
Spicer wasn’t really wrong about the inauguration crowd size when he said it was the largest in history, Conway insisted to NBC’s Chuck Todd.
No, he was merely using “alternative facts.”
A lot has happened since then — a daily tsunami of mind-numbing craziness — but try to remember how insane this sounded at the time.
And think about where we are now.
Then you will know why, as 2017 unfolded, I started saying “reality-based press” to describe what detractors prefer to call the mainstream media. President Trump, of course, takes the disparagement further, referring to “fake media” in his constant effort to undermine reporting that isn’t pure adulation.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Not fake news, just plain wrong: Top media corrections of 2017
https://www.poynter.org/news/not-fake-news-just-plain-wrong-top-media-corrections-2017
The internet ruins everything — even end-of-year listicles.
What used to be a generally light-hearted column about the most outrageous corrections issued by media organizations over the past twelve months (see our lists for 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016) has to switch gears significantly this year.
One year ago, Donald Trump started calling media reports he disagreed with “fake news” — regardless of whether they were inaccurate or not. He hasn’t stopped.
Two things can be true at the same time. Journalists screw up — often. And we have a responsibility to do better. At the same time, quality journalism is geared towards reaching the truth. We cross-check sources. We fact-check claims. We correct our mistakes, as the vast collection of examples below shows. Few other professions are as wedded to corrections as ours is. As a former fact-checker, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times a politician publicly corrected a false claim.
As I wrote earlier this year, journalism can’t afford for corrections to be the next victim of the “fake news” frenzy. In too many countries (like my own), the media corrects surreptitiously, when at all. Those outlets that do correct, dedicating time and resources to a fully-fleshed editorial process should be rewarded, not penalized. So here’s a good intention for 2018: Let’s double down on corrections policies and be more humble as we seek the facts.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ben Popper / The Verge:
In 2017, YouTube’s business grew while its public image suffered after lacking protections against hate speech and disturbing kids’ videos
http://www.theverge.com/2017/12/22/16805410/youtube-business-scandals-best-worst-year
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jack Shafer / Politico:
Trump continues to define the press as his prime adversary, using Twitter and a Fox News alliance to bury damaging stories and capitalize on recent media errors — Assessing Year One. — The guy who said, “Never quarrel with a man who buys his ink by the barrel,” didn’t anticipate Donald Trump.
Who’s Winning Trump’s War With the Press?
Assessing Year One.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/12/27/trump-press-war-winning-216160
Since becoming president, Trump has argued the news media to a stalemate thanks to the power of his alliance with the Fox News Network and his 44 million-follower Twitter account, which functions as one of the world’s largest printing presses. And the ink is free.
What makes Trump’s success at media-jamming so remarkable is that it coincides with a national press that has bird-dogged his every appointment, his every policy decision, his every political flip-flop, and of course, every ripple in the Russian investigation. The stronger the press gets, the greater Trump’s powers of deflection become, a spiral destined to take both to heaven or at the very least to hell.
Trump isn’t the first American president to square off against the press, obviously.
By defining the press as his prime adversary—not a foreign power or “terrorism” or an energy crisis, as previous presidents have—Trump has changed the way we view the press and the way the press views itself. For Trump, the struggle is Manichean, with him representing good and the press representing bad. In a recent tweet, he wrote, “Wow, more than 90% of Fake News Media coverage of me is negative, with numerous forced retractions of untrue stories. Hence my use of Social Media, the only way to get the truth out. Much of Mainstream Meadia [sic] has become a joke!” At an August rally, he said journalists are “sick people,” “liars” who are fomenting “division.”
The press has accepted the role of the opposition party if not the designation.
Trump’s rows with journalists have made him America’s highest-profile press critic, a kind of malignant, self-interested ombudsman. Painting from his limited palette, he uses television addresses, interviews and tweets to depict stories he dislikes as “fakes” or “lies.” The effect has been maddening for journalists, who have exhausted themselves by writing counter-responses that say, “No! We’re on the level!”—the effect of which is to reinforce the impression among the president’s most loyal subjects that they are indeed the opposition party.
Being the most mistake-prone president in history hasn’t prevented Trump from capitalizing on the press corps’ recent errors.
These miscues in Trump coverage don’t necessarily mean that the press has a special vendetta against him, and one suspects he knows that. The making of mistakes cannot be divorced from the making of journalism.
The slickest of Trump’s media-jamming techniques, perfected during the campaign, is to bury damaging news stories in a blur of fuming tweets.
Not only does Trump distract his critics with 280-character rampages, he dilutes whatever offense he has committed by committing new offenses.
Our current media standoff depends on Fox News Channel to transmit and amplify the Trump worldview. The network didn’t plump for Trump until he became his party’s likely nominee. But it was only after he became president that Fox enshrouded him in 24/7 protective cover, remaking itself indistinguishable from state-run media
The “Trump Effect,” Erik Wemple’s felicitous term for the media explosion lit by the president, has benefited the national press almost as much as it has Fox. The New York Times added 154,000 digital-only subscriptions in the last quarter, bringing its total digital subscriptions to about 2.5 million.
Trump has paid a terrible price for his war with the press, with first-year approval ratings sinking lower than the Kermadec Trench: Even though the economy grew like topsy in 2017, his favorable ratings are in the mid-30s.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Margaret Sullivan / Washington Post:
As attacks on the “mainstream media” increase, referring to it as the “reality-based press” is apt because journalism’s job is to dig out the facts
Why I started saying ‘reality-based press’ in 2017, instead of ‘mainstream media’
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/why-i-started-saying-reality-based-press-in-2017-instead-of-mainstream-media/2017/12/21/33b7f9e0-e66a-11e7-833f-155031558ff4_story.html
On Jan. 22, Kellyanne Conway defended the president’s order that Sean Spicer, in his first appearance before the White House press corps, should feed reporters a whopping lie.
Spicer wasn’t really wrong about the inauguration crowd size when he said it was the largest in history, Conway insisted to NBC’s Chuck Todd.
No, he was merely using “alternative facts.”
A lot has happened since then — a daily tsunami of mind-numbing craziness — but try to remember how insane this sounded at the time.
And think about where we are now.
Then you will know why, as 2017 unfolded, I started saying “reality-based press” to describe what detractors prefer to call the mainstream media. President Trump, of course, takes the disparagement further, referring to “fake media” in his constant effort to undermine reporting that isn’t pure adulation.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Linux Journal Ceases Publication
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/linux-journal-ceases-publication?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+linuxjournalcom+%28Linux+Journal+-+The+Original+Magazine+of+the+Linux+Community%29
The simple fact is that we’ve run out of money, and options along with it. We never had a wealthy corporate parent or deep pockets of our own, and that made us an anomaly among publishers, from start to finish. While we got to be good at flying close to the ground for a long time, we lost what little elevation we had in November, when the scale finally tipped irrevocably to the negative.
While we see a future like publishing’s past—a time when advertisers sponsor a publication because they value its brand and readers—the advertising world we have today would rather chase eyeballs, preferably by planting tracking beacons in readers’ browsers and zapping them with ads anywhere those readers show up. But that future isn’t here, and the past is long gone.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Thousands of major sites are taking silent anti-ad-blocking measures
https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/27/thousands-of-major-sites-are-taking-silent-anti-ad-blocking-measures/?ncid=rss&utm_source=tcfbpage&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&sr_share=facebook
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Thousands of major sites are taking silent anti-ad-blocking measures
Posted 22 hours ago by Devin Coldewey
It’s no secret that ad blockers are putting a dent in advertising-based business models on the web. This has produced a range of reactions, from relatively polite whitelisting asks (TechCrunch does this) to dynamic redeployment of ads to avoid blocking. A new study finds that nearly a third of the top 10,000 sites on the web are taking ad blocking countermeasures, many silent and highly sophisticated.
Seeing the uptick in anti-ad-blocking tech, University of Iowa and UC Riverside researchers decided to perform a closer scrutiny (PDF) of major sites than had previously been done.
The researchers visited thousands of sites multiple times, with and without ad-blocking software added to the browser. By comparing the final rendered code of the page for blocking browsers versus non-blocking browsers, they could see when pages changed content or noted the presence of a blocker, even if they didn’t notify the user.
http://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~mshafiq/files/adblock-ndss2018.pdf
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google’s CEO Doesn’t Use Bullet Points and Neither Should You
https://www.inc.com/carmine-gallo/how-googles-ceo-creates-brain-friendly-presentations.html
Google’s Sundar Pichai gives a master class for creating simple, engaging presentations.
According to Anderson, each bullet point becomes its own slide. A bullet point might become one sentence on a slide or be replaced entirely with a photo. In Pichai’s Google presentation on A.I., slide number five carried the theme. There were five words on the slide: “Mobile first to A.I. first.”
Pichai’s slide obeyed the TED rule–delete, delete, delete. It works for Google. It will work for you.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mass hysteria returned
https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-9988492
Tomi Engdahl says:
Kaitlyn Tiffany / The Verge:
Niche online communities and media grew in 2017, through Patreon, TinyLetter, “finstagrams”, and more as people looked for alternatives to Facebook and Twitter
The year we wanted the internet to be smaller
Why tiny, weird online communities made a comeback in 2017
https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/28/16795090/internet-community-2017-post-mortem-tumblr-amino-drip-tinyletter
Americans got tired of big social media in 2017. Or at least, we stopped wanting to look at it, and we stopped pretending to like it.
This feels true to me as someone who uses the internet every day, but I also know it’s true because when The Verge partnered with Reticle Research to conduct a representative survey of Americans’ attitudes towards tech’s biggest power players, 15.4 percent of Facebook users said they “greatly” or “somewhat” disliked using the product, while 17 percent of Twitter users said the same. That made them the most disliked of the six companies in question, which also included Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. More than 10 percent of respondents described Facebook’s effect on society as “very negative,” and 10.5 percent said the same about Twitter — in both cases a higher number than the other four companies combined.
The survey doesn’t reveal why Americans feel the way they do, but last December, writing about the impulse to call 2016 “the worst year ever,” The New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino articulated a pretty good guess as to why spending your time on the web’s massive, news-saturated platforms might feel so bad: “There is no limit to the amount of misfortune a person can take in via the internet,”
The mainstream social internet is so big; everyone is connected to everyone, over a billion on Facebook alone. The consequences of connection — fake news, radicalization, massive targeted harassment campaigns, algorithmically-generated psychological torment, inane bullshit — were not part of what we were sold. We don’t really have the option of moving our lives off of the internet, and coordinated boycotts of our monstrous platforms have been brief and mostly fruitless.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Fred Wilson / AVC:
Three interrelated macro themes dominated this year in tech: the breakout of crypto, beginning of the end of white male dominance, and the backlash against tech
What Happened In 2017
http://avc.com/2017/12/what-happened-in-2017/
2017 is the year when crypto/blockchain entered the frenzy phase. Over $3.7bn was raised by various crypto teams/projects to build out the infrastructure of Internet 3.0 (the decentralized Internet). To put that number into context, that is about equal to the total seed/angel investment in the US in 2017.
This is the biggest story in tech in 2017 because transitions from Internet 1.0 to Internet 2.0 to Internet 3.0 cause tremendous opportunity and tremendous disruption. Not all of the big companies of the dialup phase (Yahoo, AOL, Amazon, eBay) made a healthy transition into the mobile/broadband phase. And not all of the big companies of the broadband/mobile phase (Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon) will make a healthy transition into the decentralized phase. Some will, some won’t.
In the venture business, you wait for these moments to come because they are where the big opportunities are. And the next big one is coming.
The big story of 2017 in the US was the beginning of the end of white male dominance. This is not a tech story, per se, but the tech sector was impacted by it. We saw numerous top VCs and tech CEOs leave their firms and companies over behavior that was finally outed and deemed unacceptable.
I think the trigger for this was the election of Donald Trump as President of the US in late 2016. He is the epitome of white male dominance.
The Tech Backlash:
I got this one right. It was easy. You could see it coming from miles away. Tech is the new Wall Street, full of ultra rich out of touch people who have too much power and not enough empathy.
Add to that context the fact that the big tech platforms, Facebook, Google, and Twitter, were used to hack the 2016 election, and you get the backlash. I think we are seeing the start of something that has a lot of legs. Human beings don’t want to be controlled by machines. And we are increasingly being controlled by machines. We are addicted to our phones, fed information by algorithms we don’t understand, at risk of losing our jobs to robots. This is likely to be the narrative of the next thirty years.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch:
Analysis of code from the top 10K websites on Alexa finds that 30.5% employ anti-ad blocking measures, many of which are hidden from the sites’ visitors
Thousands of major sites are taking silent anti-ad-blocking measures
https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/27/thousands-of-major-sites-are-taking-silent-anti-ad-blocking-measures/
Tomi Engdahl says:
John Bowden / The Hill:
In a New York Times interview, Trump says media will shift in his favor for the 2020 election because they need ratings: “they basically have to let me win”
Trump: I will win in 2020 because ‘media will tank’ without me
http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/366742-trump-i-will-win-in-2020-because-media-will-tank-without-me
President Trump predicted on Thursday he will win the 2020 presidential race due to a media shift in his favor, telling The New York Times that the national news media knows it will “tank” without him in the White House.
In an interview at his Florida golf course, Trump said that ratings for “all forms of media will tank” unless he is in the White House, which will provoke positive media coverage from organizations that have been critical of his policies in the past.
“They basically have to let me win,” he predicted.
Trump has frequently attacked the national news media while in office, and earlier Thursday asked his followers to help him award a “fake news trophy” for 2017.
“The FAKE NEWS has utterly abandoned their duty to fairly report the news to the American people,” Thursday’s email reads.