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:
Adblock Plus Acquires Pirate Bay Founder’s Micropayment Service Flattr
https://torrentfreak.com/adblock-plus-acquires-pirate-bay-founders-micropayment-service-flattr-170405/
The company behind the popular Adblock Plus software has acquired Flattr, the micropayment service co-founded by Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde. With the deal the two companies hope to take their partnership to the next level, offering publishers a way to get paid without having to show annoying ads.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Apr 19, 2017 | 4:18 PM EDT
Exclusive: Putin-linked think tank drew up plan to sway 2016 U.S. election – documents
http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN17L2N3
A Russian government think tank controlled by Vladimir Putin developed a plan to swing the 2016 U.S. presidential election to Donald Trump and undermine voters’ faith in the American electoral system, three current and four former U.S. officials told Reuters.
strategy papers
recommended the Kremlin launch a propaganda campaign on social media and Russian state-backed global news outlets
messaging about voter fraud
and
damage Clinton’s reputation
The documents were central to the Obama administration’s conclusion that Russia mounted a “fake news” campaign and launched cyber attacks
Neither of the Russian institute documents mentioned the release of hacked Democratic Party emails to interfere with the U.S. election
Tomi Engdahl says:
George Slefo / Ad Age:
Google, Microsoft, major ad buyers and publishers coordinating on ad blocking plan, says Coalition for Better Ads’ counsel, who expects a rollout by end-of-year
Ad Industry Powers Consider Adopting Ad Blocking on a Wide Scale
http://adage.com/article/digital/biggest-players-ad-industry-move-kill-worst-ads/308747/
The biggest players in advertising and tech are mapping out a strategy to kill off the digital ads that have been deemed as the absolute worst by consumers.
The most likely approach is the adoption of a “technology” — the term “ad blocker” has baggage among many of the participants in talks on the subject — that would prevent browsers such as Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge from displaying autoplaying video ads with sound, pop-up ads and ads that quickly flash or change colors.
The discussions are taking place among members of the industry’s Coalition for Better Ads, including Google, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, WPP’s ad-buying giant GroupM, Facebook, Thomson Reuters, The Washington Post, the Interactive Advertising Bureau and the Association of National Advertisers, according to Stu Ingis, counsel to the coalition and attorney at Venable LLP.
“The end game here is to remove these types of ads which are undercutting the consumer internet experience,” Ingis said. “Truthfully, those ads can potentially and seriously undercut the broader internet ecosystem.”
A “blocking mechanism” or “technology” to prevent such ads from appearing will be put into place before the end of this year, Ingis predicted.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Don’t Try This at Home is Cliché for a Reason
http://hackaday.com/2017/04/19/dont-try-this-at-home-is-cliche-for-a-reason/
We’ve seen one dangerous YouTube video too many. Are we honestly cursed with a false feedback system that unequitably rewards dangerous behavior in online videos? Obviously the answer is ‘yes’. Now the real question becomes, can we do anything about it?
Marketing is all about putting something in front of a consumer and getting their brain to go “awesome!”.
Back in the day, people were hurt and even killed when replicating stunts they saw done on television. To protect from litigation, companies started adding disclaimers — Don’t Try this at Home or my favorite: Professional Driver on a Closed Course.
But the thing is, commercials are big business. If someone gets hurt, there’s money to be had by assigning blame in a court of law.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jessica Davies / Digiday:
The Guardian confirms it has stopped publishing its articles to Apple News and Facebook Instant Articles
The Guardian pulls out of Facebook’s Instant Articles and Apple News
http://digiday.com/media/guardian-pulls-facebooks-instant-articles-apple-news/
Publishers aren’t happy with the deal platforms are cutting them. Now, the Guardian has dropped both Facebook’s fast-loading Instant Article format and will no longer publish content on Apple News.
The publisher had gone all-in on Instant Articles, running every single Guardian article via the format for the last year. It was one of first U.K. media owners to adopt the Facebook format, alongside BBC News in the spring of 2015. The Guardian was also among the first publishers to join the Apple News app when it launched in the U.K. in October 2015. It ran all its articles in the app.
A Guardian News and Media spokesperson confirmed the removal, and issued the following statement to Digiday: “We have run extensive trials on Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News to assess how they fit with our editorial and commercial objectives. Having evaluated these trials, we have decided to stop publishing in those formats on both platforms.”
The publisher ceased running content through both Apple News and Instant Articles today. The move is a clear sign of displeasure in how these platform-publishing initiatives have treated the business needs of the Guardian. Many publishers have complained the money they make off visits to IA pages, for example, do not measure up to what they get on their own sites.
The Guardian isn’t the only publisher that has lately cooled on Instant Articles, with several publishers are running far fewer articles within that format, according to analysis by NewsWhip. BBC News, National Geographic and The Wall Street Journal barely seem to be using Instant Articles either. The New York Times has pulled out altogether.
The Guardian, under pressure to cut costs and boost revenue, is pushing forwards with its paying membership scheme
It has notched up 200,000 paying members
Meanwhile the Guardian’s use of Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages, the rival to Instant Articles, seems to be going strong.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Adrienne LaFrance / The Atlantic:
Yahoo’s fate is a sign of what’s to come for businesses including news organizations that rely heavily on digital ad revenue
Yahoo’s Demise Is a Death Knell for Digital News Orgs
The beleaguered company’s failure is a sign of what’s to come for many ad-based websites.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/yahoos-demise-is-a-death-knell-for-digital-news-orgs/523692/
Yahoo filed its final quarterly report this week. And just like that, the once-mighty tech firm is exiting public trading.
The company has been unraveling—slowly and spectacularly—for more than a decade now. But this particular moment is a good one for reflecting on how Yahoo’s troubles are likely to be replicated in a wave across the web, and soon, among businesses like news organizations that rely heavily on advertising revenue for their survival.
Print newspapers will continue to fold, but Yahoo’s demise is a signal that web-native companies are next. If you run a business that relies on digital-advertising revenue for an outsized portion of your funding, you need to find new streams of revenue. Now. It may already be too late.
Unless you’re Facebook or Google, that is. Facebook and Google are practically drowning in ad revenue—together they command a huge portion of global digital-ad dollars—and that’s the root of the problem for every other business trying to clamor for a piece of it.
The precise estimates vary. One often-repeated stat, based on last year’s financials, is that Facebook and Google account for 85-percent of every new dollar spent on digital advertising.
Many investors have reached this conclusion, too. “The ad-tech market will go the way of search, social, and mobile as investors and entrepreneurs concede that Google and Facebook have won and everyone else has lost,” the venture capitalist and blogger Fred Wilson wrote in January. “It will be nearly impossible to raise money for an online advertising business in 2017.”
Though Yahoo’s failures were multi-faceted, the company’s fundamental problem was that it could not figure out a way to command a significant enough piece of the advertising money that is increasingly rushing to Facebook and Google.
Way back in 1995, Yahoo seemed destined to establish a successful ad-based business model for the internet era.
But the picture is much different now. Today, Facebook and Google alone are slurping up the ad dollars, neither company pays for the news it features
Tomi Engdahl says:
Davey Alba / Wired:
Inside Google’s ads quality rater program, where contractors rush to flag and label inappropriate YouTube content for $15 per hour, while training Google’s AI
The Hidden Laborers Training AI to Keep Ads Off Hateful YouTube Videos
https://www.wired.com/2017/04/zerochaos-google-ads-quality-raters/
Every day across the nation, people doing work for Google log in to their computers and start watching YouTube. They look for violence in videos. They seek out hateful language in video titles. They decide whether to classify clips as “offensive” or “sensitive.” They are Google’s so-called “ads quality raters,” temporary workers hired by outside agencies to render judgments machines still can’t make all on their own. And right now, Google appears to need these humans’ help—urgently.
YouTube, the Google-owned video giant, sells ads that accompany millions of the site’s videos each day. Automated systems determine where those ads appear, and advertisers often don’t know which specific videos their ads will show up next to. Recently, that uncertainty has turned into a big problem for Google. The company has come under scrutiny after multiple reports revealed that it had allowed ads to run against YouTube videos promoting hate and terrorism. Advertisers such as Walmart, PepsiCo, and Verizon, ditched the platform, and much of the wider Google ad network.
Google has scrambled to control the narrative, saying the media has overstated the problem of ads showing up adjacent to offensive videos. Flagged videos received “less than 1/1000th of a percent of the advertisers’ total impressions,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Earth Is Flat? Check Wikipedia
http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/03/20/520845007/the-earth-is-flat-check-wikipedia
Fake news has been, well, in the news a lot lately. It seems no claim is too absurd to be aired.
For example, NBA legend Shaquille O’Neal has just become the fourth NBA star to make public remarks that he believes the Earth is flat, not round.
“I’m just saying. I drive from Florida to California all the time, and it’s flat to me,” he said on a podcast he hosts.
For the world’s largest crowdsourced encyclopedia, combating myths like this is nothing new.
“Wikipedia has been dealing with fake news since it started 16 years ago,”
Today, educators are among those more concerned than ever with standards of truth and evidence and with the lightning-fast spread of misinformation online.
Flat Earth Hoax: Began As a Ridiculous Farce to See How Gullible People Would Be
http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2016/01/flat-earth-hoax-began-as-a-ridiculous-farce-to-see-how-gullible-people-would-be-3273014.html
TMR Editor’s Note:
There is perhaps no other internet hoax that is more ludicrous than the Flat Earth Theory. We’re talking about the most nonsensical and preposterous, laughable and foolish hoax in history! Yes, it is that zany and loony, wacky and silly.
However, what is really crazy is how many people are buying into it.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Stories About
Fake news
http://www.npr.org/tags/502124007/fake-news
Tomi Engdahl says:
When A Politician Says ‘Fake News’ And A Newspaper Threatens To Sue Back
http://www.npr.org/2017/02/17/515760101/when-a-politician-says-fake-news-and-a-newspaper-threatens-to-sue-back
A news outlet publishes a story that a Republican politician dismisses as “fake news.” Sounds familiar, right?
But in this case, there’s a twist. The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel in Colorado is accusing state Sen. Ray Scott of defamation and threatening to sue. If filed, legal experts said it would be the first suit of its kind, potentially setting a legal definition for what is considered fake news and what is not.
The accusation that the column was “a fake news story” raised the ire of Jay Seaton, the Sentinel’s publisher.
“I’m accustomed to all kinds of criticism for what we do; that comes with the job,” he said. But Seaton says the term “fake news” is “an attempt to undermine the speaker. That’s where this bumps up against the First Amendment. When you’ve got a government actor who doesn’t like something he’s seen and tries to diminish its credibility, then you’ve got real problems.”
And, potentially, a lawsuit. Seaton says he’s going to cool down for a couple of weeks but is looking at his options for filing the suit, which is likely to put the “fake news” term in the spotlight,
Tomi Engdahl says:
Laura Hazard Owen / Nieman Lab:
Jimmy Wales launches Wikitribune, a crowdfunded news site that will use journalists to write and volunteers to fact check in effort to combat fake news — The crowd-funded news platform aims to combat fake news by combining professional journalism with volunteer fact checking: “news by the people and for the people.”
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales launches Wikitribune, a large-scale attempt to combat fake news
http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/04/wikipedia-founder-jimmy-wales-launches-wikitribune-news-by-the-people-and-for-the-people/
The crowd-funded news platform aims to combat fake news by combining professional journalism with volunteer fact checking: “news by the people and for the people.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mark Walton / Ars Technica UK:
Google announces series of YouTuber-led “Internet Citizens” workshops in the UK designed to tackle the spread of online hate speech and fake news
Google pushes fake news, hate-speech workshops (and YouTube) on UK teens
After backlash over censored LGBTQ+ content, Google debuts “Internet Citizens” project.
https://arstechnica.co.uk/business/2017/04/google-fake-news-hate-speech-workshops/
Google has announced a series of workshops designed to apparently tackle the spread of online hate speech and fake news. The “Internet Citizens” workshops aimed at teenagers are intended to promote “tolerance,” “empathy,” and to raise “awareness” of the plethora of social issues that plague online communities.
It’s promised that the workshops—hosted by YouTubers Nadir Nahdi, Alain Clapham, and Efe Ezekiel and created with the advice of the Metropolitan Police and the Active Change Foundation—will teach teens how to deal with offensive speech, flag inappropriate content, and moderate comments. Google will also note how to spot fake news, and (because this is Google, after all) use online video services like YouTube to increase diversity.
The Internet Citizens programme launches in Liverpool and will visit youth clubs across the country in the coming months, Google said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ginny Marvin / Marketing Land:
Google adding TV ad inventory to DoubleClick Bid Manager, letting advertisers measure video campaigns across digital media and linear TV
Google trying TV ad buying again with DoubleClick Bid Manager
In a new test, advertisers will be able to buy linear TV spots programmatically via DBM.
http://marketingland.com/tv-inventory-access-doubleclick-bid-manager-212884
Tomi Engdahl says:
Robots.txt meant for search engines don’t work well for web archives
https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-search-engines-dont-work-well-for-web-archives/
Robots.txt files were invented 20+ years ago to help advise “robots,” mostly search engine web crawlers, which sections of a web site should be crawled and indexed for search.
Many sites use their robots.txt files to improve their SEO (search engine optimization) by excluding duplicate content like print versions of recipes, excluding search result pages, excluding large files from crawling to save on hosting costs, or “hiding” sensitive areas of the site like administrative pages. (Of course, over the years malicious actors have also used robots.txt files to identify those same sensitive areas!) Some crawlers, like Google, pay attention to robots.txt directives, while others do not.
Over time we have observed that the robots.txt files that are geared toward search engine crawlers do not necessarily serve our archival purposes.
A few months ago we stopped referring to robots.txt files on U.S. government and military web sites for both crawling and displaying web pages (though we respond to removal requests sent to [email protected]). As we have moved towards broader access it has not caused problems, which we take as a good sign. We are now looking to do this more broadly.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Just 23% of people now prefer watching TV shows on televisions
Laptops, desktops, and mobile are more popular
http://www.techspot.com/news/69060-23-people-now-prefer-watching-tv-shows-televisions.html
Watching TV shows on devices other than tradition televisions is becoming ever more widespread, and the speed at which people’s viewing habits are changing is increasing. According to a recent survey, only 23 percent of people now prefer to use a TV for watching shows, a drop of 55 percent during the past year.
The 2017 Digital Consumer Survey, from business strategy and technology consulting firm Accenture, asked 26,000 consumers in 26 countries how they prefer to consume their TV content.
42 percent picked their laptop or desktop as the favorite device for watching TV shows, an increase of 32 percent from last year. And 13 percent said they prefer using smartphones, up from 10 percent a year earlier.
People’s preference for watching sports games on TVs has also fallen, down to 19 percent from 38 percent in the 2016 survey.
The findings have been described as “a very, very big surprise” by Mike Chapman, Accenture Strategy managing director and head of the company’s global media and entertainment strategy practice. It was only back in 2014 when 65 percent of people indicated they preferred TV sets for watching shows.
Tomi Engdahl says:
New Accenture Survey Reveals 55 Percent Drop in Consumers Who Prefer to Watch TV Shows on TV Sets
https://newsroom.accenture.com/news/new-accenture-survey-reveals-55-percent-drop-in-consumers-who-prefer-to-watch-tv-shows-on-tv-sets.htm
Tomi Engdahl says:
Danny Sullivan / Search Engine Land:
To combat fake news, Google allows users to report inappropriate search suggestions, aims to improve search quality with an emphasis on authoritative content
Google’s ‘Project Owl’ — a three-pronged attack on fake news & problematic content
http://searchengineland.com/googles-project-owl-attack-fake-news-273700
Google hopes to improve by better surfacing authoritative content and enlisting feedback about suggested searches and Featured Snippets answers.
Google knows it has a search quality problem. It’s been plagued since November with concerns about fake news, disturbing answers and offensive search suggestions appearing at the top of its results. “Project Owl” is an effort by the company to address these issues, with three specific actions being announced today.
In particular, Google is launching:
a new feedback form for search suggestions, plus formal policies about why suggestions might be removed.
a new feedback form for “Featured Snippets” answers.
a new emphasis on authoritative content to improve search quality.
“Problematic searches” is a term I’ve been giving to a situations where Google is coping with the consequences of the “post-truth” world. People are increasingly producing content that reaffirms a particular world view or opinion regardless of actual facts. In addition, people are searching in enough volume for rumors, urban myths, slurs or derogatory topics that they’re influencing the search suggestions that Google offers in offensive and possibly dangerous ways.
These are problematic searches, because they don’t fall in the clear-cut areas where Google has typically taken action. Google has long dealt with search spam, where people try to manipulate its results outside acceptable practices for monetary gain. It has had to deal with piracy. It’s had to deal with poor-quality content showing up for popular searches.
Problematic searches aren’t any of those issues. Instead, they involve fake news, where people completely make things up. They involve heavily-biased content. They involve rumors, conspiracies and myths. They can include shocking or offensive information. They pose an entirely new quality problem for Google, hence my dubbing them “problematic searches.”
Problematic searches aren’t new but typically haven’t been an big issue because of how relatively infrequent they are. In an interview last week, Pandu Nayak — a Google Fellow who works on search quality — spoke to this:
“This turns out to be a very small problem, a fraction of our query stream. So it doesn’t actually show up very often or almost ever in our regular evals and so forth. And we see these problems. It feels like a small problem,” Nayak said.
But over the past few months, they’ve grown as a major public relations nightmare for the company.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google tackles ‘fake news’ with improved Search ranking, direct feedback tools, more
https://9to5google.com/2017/04/25/google-search-fake-news-changes/
In the midst of hundreds of billions of indexed pages, .25 percent of daily queries return “offensive or clearly misleading content.”
Google is using human evaluators to assess the quality of search results for that subset of problematic queries.
With more detailed Search Quality Rater Guidelines for low-quality pages (misleading information, unexpected offensive results, hoaxes and unsupported conspiracy theories), algorithms will begin demoting low-quality content.
Additionally, Google is launching direct feedback tools that will allow users to flag erroneous Featured Snippets and Autocomplete predictions.
Tomi Engdahl says:
George Slefo / Ad Age:
IAB: digital ad revenue grew 22% YoY to $72.5B in 2016, surpassing TV for the first time; idea that Google/Facebook ‘duopoly’ is driving ad growth is incorrect
Desktop and Mobile Ad Revenue Surpasses TV for the First Time
Digital advertising saw $72.5 billion revenue in 2016, a 22% upswing from the previous year.
http://adage.com/article/digital/digital-ad-revenue-surpasses-tv-desktop-iab/308808/
Step aside, TV and desktop: Digital advertising revenue surged nearly 22% to $72.5 billion for the 2016 calendar year, up from the $59.6 billion reported in 2015, the Interactive Advertising Bureau said Thursday in a report prepared by PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Although it marks eight consecutive record breaking years, the IAB’s report represents the first time mobile has overtaken desktop spending, and the first time digital as a whole has passed TV ad spend.
TV is no longer No. 1 in ad spend
IAB: The media has overstated the scale of the so-called duopoly
Search is fueling mobile’s growth
Digital radio has arrived
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook admits: governments exploited us to spread propaganda
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/27/facebook-report-government-propaganda?CMP=share_btn_tw
Company will step up security to clamp down on ‘information operations’
Facebook suspended 30,000 accounts in France before presidential election
Facebook has publicly acknowledged that its platform has been exploited by governments seeking to manipulate public opinion in other countries – including during the presidential elections in the US and France – and pledged to clamp down on such “information operations”.
In a white paper authored by the company’s security team and published on Thursday, the company detailed well-funded and subtle techniques used by nations and other organizations to spread misleading information and falsehoods for geopolitical goals. These efforts go well beyond “fake news”,
“We have had to expand our security focus from traditional abusive behavior, such as account hacking, malware, spam and financial scams, to include more subtle and insidious forms of misuse, including attempts to manipulate civic discourse and deceive people,” said the company.
The company also explained how it monitored “several situations” that fit the pattern of information operations during the US presidential election. The company detected “malicious actors” using social media to share information stolen from other sources
Tomi Engdahl says:
Brian Stelter / CNNMoney:
Sources: DoJ investigation of Fox News widens, with interviews being conducted by the US Postal Inspection Service, which probes mail and wire fraud cases — Fox News still under grand jury probe — The U.S. Justice Department’s investigation of Fox News has widened to include a second law enforcement agency.
EXCLUSIVE: Advanced Talks Underway For New Conservative Network Amid Fears Fox News Moving Too Far Left
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/exclusive-advanced-talks-underway-for-new-conservative-network-amid-fears-fox-news-moving-too-far-left/
On the heels of major shakeups at the Fox News Network, an alternative conservative network is being actively discussed amongst conservative fat cats.
Murdochs Exploring Fox News Options as Pressure on Bill Shine Mounts
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/murdochs-exploring-fox-news-options-as-pressure-bill-shine-mounts-998394
The company has quietly put out feelers for a possible new head of Fox News
The Murdochs may be preparing for a leadership change at Fox News. Sources tell The Hollywood Reporter that Rupert Murdoch and his sons James and Lachlan, CEO and co-chairman of Fox News parent 21st Century Fox, have quietly put out feelers for a new head of Fox News.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Fyre Festival: The Fiasco We All Should Have Seen Coming
https://www.wired.com/2017/04/fyre-festival-fiasco-seen-coming/?mbid=social_fb
Tomi Engdahl says:
Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
Facebook updates Rights Manager tool to let creators claim ad earnings on copyright-infringing videos posted by others — Facebook finally has a better solution to freebooting — the common practice of stealing video and uploading it to one’s Facebook Page to reap the engagement and audience growth.
Facebook lets content owners claim ad earnings of pirated videos
https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/27/not-so-freebooting/
Facebook finally has a better solution to freebooting — the common practice of stealing video and uploading it to one’s Facebook Page to reap the engagement and audience growth. Today’s update to the Facebook Rights Manager tool that launched last year includes the new option to “claim ad earnings” on other people’s uploads of a video you own. This way if an infringing video includes a new mid-roll ad break Facebook is testing, the revenue will be sent to the content’s owner instead of the uploader who stole it.
And now instead of manually reviewing all pirated content instances, rights owners can set automated rules for whether infringing uploads should instantly be blocked, allowed but the viewing metrics shown to the owner, allowed with the owner claiming the ad earnings or sent to manual review.
The “claim ad earnings” option puts Facebook Rights Manager closer to feature parity with the industry standard, YouTube’s Content ID.
Previously, the only course of action for rights holders was to allow or block and take down infringing videos. Both removed the opportunity for content owners and pirates to share in the benefits of compelling content — the owner getting the money and the pirate getting the engagement.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Krishna Bharat:
Creator of Google News describes traits of story clusters and their sharing patterns that can be used by algorithms and humans to flag them as fake
How to Detect Fake News in Real-Time
Fast enough to empower humans to take action
https://shift.newco.co/how-to-detect-fake-news-in-real-time-9fdae0197bfd
Platforms need to act
As many have noted, addressing fake news is best done at the level of the major platforms — Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple. They control the arteries through which most of the world’s fresh information and influence flows. They are best positioned to see a disinformation outbreak forming. Their engineering teams have the technical chops to detect it and the knobs needed to to respond to it.
Both social networks and search engines have engineering levers (think: ranking flexibility) and product options to reduce exposure, mark as false, or fully stop misinformation waves. They will make these decisions individually based on the severity of the problem and how their organization balances information accuracy and author freedom. Google Search has a focus on information access. Facebook sees itself as a facilitator of expression. They may resolve things differently.
What is a wave? A wave in my parlance is a set of articles that make the same new (and possibly erroneous) claim, plus associated social media posts. A wave is significant if it is growing in engagement. Since the cost of human intervention is high, it only makes sense to flag significant waves that have traits that suggest misinformation.
The goal of the detection algorithm is to flag suspicious waves before they cross an exposure threshold, so that human responders can do something about it.
To make this concrete: Let us say that a social media platform has decided that it wants to fully address fake news by the time it gets 10,000 shares. To achieve this they may want to have the wave flagged at 1,000 shares, so that human evaluators have time to study it and respond.
What makes detecting fake news tractable is that platforms are able to observe articles and posts, not just in isolation, but in the context of all else that is being said on that subject in real-time. This expanded and timely context makes all the difference.
It is important that the policing of fake news by platforms happen in a way that is both defensible and transparent. Defensible, in the sense that they explain what they are policing and how this being executed, and operate in a manner that the public is comfortable with.
I would expect them to target fake news narrowly to only encompass factual claims that are demonstrably wrong. They should avoid policing opinion or claims that cannot be checked. Platforms like to avoid controversy and a narrow, crisp definition will keep them out of the woods.
In terms of transparency, I would expect all news that has been identified as false and slowed down or blocked to be revealed publicly. They may choose to delay this to avoid tipping their hand during the news cycle, but they should disclose within a reasonable period (say, 15 days) all news that was impacted.
arms race with fake news producers
The biggest challenge to stopping fake news is not technical. It is operational willingness.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Politico:
Survey of White House press: 75% see Trump’s verbal attacks more as distraction than threat; 68% see Trump as most openly anti-press president in US history
What It’s Really Like to Cover Trump
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/28/poll-trump-white-house-press-corps-journalists-215051
Tomi Engdahl says:
Turkey blocks Wikipedia under law designed to protect national security
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/29/turkey-blocks-wikipedia-under-law-designed-to-protect-national-security
Users trying to access online encyclopaedia via Turkish internet providers receive ‘connection timed out’ error message
Tomi Engdahl says:
Alan Rusbridger / Committee to Protect Journalists:
As revenue declines for traditional media in Kenya, government withholds ad payments for leverage over what gets published
Fiscal Blackmail
https://cpj.org/2017/04/fiscal-blackmail.php
The Kenyan government withdraws advertising when newspapers step out of line
In some parts of the world, it is still possible to silence a journalist with a sharp blow to the side of the head. But as newspapers the world over struggle with the financial disruption of digital technologies, governments are finding new ways of controlling the press. Murder is messy. Money is tidy.
But as revenues drain away from traditional media due to the inroads of digital technologies, the use of financial-induced self-censorship, or “fiscing,” can also ensure that journalists are more “reasonable” in their reporting.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Real books are back. E-book sales plunge nearly 20%
http://money.cnn.com/2017/04/27/media/ebooks-sales-real-books/index.html
New data suggest that the reading public is ditching e-books and returning to the old fashioned printed word.
Sales of consumer e-books plunged 17% in the U.K. in 2016, according to the Publishers Association. Sales of physical books and journals went up by 7% over the same period, while children’s books surged 16%.
The same trend is on display in the U.S., where e-book sales declined 18.7%
Tomi Engdahl says:
While other digital publishers flail this Norwegian publication is adding subscribers like crazy
https://thenextweb.com/eu/2017/05/02/this-norwegian-digital-publication-is-adding-subscribers-like-crazy/#.tnw_1uIzjWAo
One of the problems that we face in a new millennium is how to support good journalism. While trying to work out the kinks of digital subscriptions, most online news outlets have had to rely solely on ad revenue.
The problem is that it doesn’t fill the gap left by subscribers and can lead to clickbaity and shoddily written articles. However, there’s still hope.
NiemanLab reported on the success of Norway’s largest local news publisher, Amedia. The company owns 62 local and regional outlets across Norway and has shown promising results in getting people to pay for digital content.
Here’s how this Norwegian publisher built a successful digital subscription model for local news
http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/05/heres-how-this-norwegian-publisher-built-a-successful-digital-subscription-model-for-local-news/
“When we started out, I’m sure a lot of people were worried about cannibalization, and people moving from print to digital, but that hasn’t really happened at all.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Max Willens / Digiday:
LinkedIn says engagement with its recently overhauled news feed is up 40% YoY as some business publishers also see spikes from referral traffic — Publishers have their ups and downs with distribution platforms, but LinkedIn is having a moment, at least with business news outlets.
Business publishers are enjoying traffic spikes from LinkedIn
http://digiday.com/media/business-publishers-enjoying-traffic-spikes-linkedin/
Publishers have their ups and downs with distribution platforms, but LinkedIn is having a moment, at least with business news outlets.
Since LinkedIn overhauled its news feed, added analytics tools for publishers and began testing a trending topics module, business-focused publishers have gotten traffic spikes from the platform, with some of them now drawing millions of readers every month. As for LinkedIn, it said engagement with its news feed is up 40 percent year over year.
Bloomberg has gotten 26 percent more traffic from LinkedIn in the past two months
LinkedIn is still only relevant to a small slice of publishers. It drives less than half of 1 percent of all global referral traffic
But several have seen big gains, partly because LinkedIn has tried new ways to get content in front of readers. For example, when major stories about certain companies are published, LinkedIn has begun sending mobile push notifications to employees of those companies, driving up clickthrough rates.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook admits: governments exploited us to spread propaganda
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/27/facebook-report-government-propaganda?CMP=share_btn_tw
Company will step up security to clamp down on ‘information operations’
Facebook suspended 30,000 accounts in France before presidential election
Facebook has publicly acknowledged that its platform has been exploited by governments seeking to manipulate public opinion in other countries – including during the presidential elections in the US and France – and pledged to clamp down on such “information operations”.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jonathan Swan / Axios:
A close read of Trump’s recent interviews reveal that he instinctively understands the reporter’s psychology and thinks like a journalist
How Trump thinks like a journalist
https://www.axios.com/trumps-killer-skill-he-thinks-like-a-journalist-2388394373.html
President Trump broke a lot of news in his whirlwind of 100-day interviews. But a close read of the interviews reveal a skill that helped him win the presidency: Trump instinctively understands the reporter’s psychology. You see this side of Trump in his off-hand asides to the journalists interviewing him that you get when the publication publishes the full transcript, as the AP and Bloomberg did.
Here’s Trump satisfying the White House reporters’ most primal urge — the need to break exclusive news:
“Well, I’m just telling you, I — I haven’t even mentioned this to anybody. I mean, I’m giving you something first.”
“Well I’m going to roll (out) probably on Wednesday, around Wednesday of next week, we’re putting out a massive tax reform … And that’s a big story, because a lot of people think I’m going to put it out much later.”
“Breaking — we have breaking news. Is this going to be breaking news, Jennifer?”
Here’s Trump deploying the ultimate form of flattering to a journalist — showing he reads the journalist’s work:
“You know, I had — Jennifer, you reported this once. I had a lot of Bernie Sanders voters for me.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Zeynep Tufekci / BuzzFeed:
Advice for France: use caution in reporting on uncurated dumps of hacked emails, which can fuel viral misinformation, violate privacy, and confuse the public
Dear France: You Just Got Hacked. Don’t Make The Same Mistakes We Did.
A brief guide to the information wars.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/zeyneptufekci/dear-france-you-just-got-hacked-dont-make-the-same-mistakes?utm_term=.ifYAWMzRd3#.qbv1WKdXnV
Ooh, la la. So, it happened to you too. The frontrunning presidential candidate got hacked, and all his emails are dumped online in one giant cache. WikiLeaks is tweeting about it. There is a hashtag. 4chan’s /pol/ is all over it. Screenshots purporting to show corruption and secret bank transfers are going viral. The meme wars are on.
This is a plea: Do not get played the way the US press got played, gullibly falling into the trap set for it. And don’t ignore what happens online. These hacks are merely the stage for the misinformation machine.
Like ours, your election came down to two candidates.
As in the US, the candidate and the political party running against the one liked by the Kremlin got hacked, not the other one. Funny how that goes. But I digress.
But there are big differences between the attacks in the United States and France as well. For one thing, this dump of stolen emails came about 41 hours before your election, and just one precious hour before French media entered the blackout period during which it cannot report substantive stuff about either candidate. So the rumor mill will mostly stay online. For another, yours is not a close election like the US one.
But it’s not time to relax. The US experience shows the many ways such uncurated dumps of hacked emails fuel viral misinformation, create grave violations of privacy, and leave the public in a state that is more confused than illuminated.
Hacking and releasing all internal documents and private communication of one campaign is a form of political sabotage, and it may be more potent than you expect. There won’t be time to prove or debunk anything, but the confusion will spread. This isn’t whistleblowing meant to shed light on the operations of power. The goal is to frustrate, not persuade, and to create doubt, confusion, and paralysis.
In the US, many reporters had great difficulty resisting the lure of the uncurated dump from the Clinton campaign.
Most of the stuff was mundane. There were a few items of public interest — vastly outweighed by the juicy, juicy gossip. A lot of this gossip made its way to major newspapers, even their front pages. Important issues got buried.
Editors will be tempted to assign many reporters to dig through the whole dump
Editors and reporters should not just follow the candy that has been deliberately dumped in front of them. It’s hard to resist such temptation, but in an age when censorship operates by distracting us from what’s important, it is crucial to consider what’s essential and what are deliberate ploys at distraction.
My advice for traditional media is simple but hard to follow: When reporting, have a laser-sharp eye on news truly in the public interest: gross misconduct, major corruption, criminal actions
Before reporting on information from a hack, ask yourself this: Would you go to great lengths to find a way to hack or leak this information if it wasn’t just conveniently dumped in front of you? If not, it’s probably not newsworthy enough to report on.
And while reporting, don’t forget the bigger story: This was an act of political sabotage, the asymmetric releasing of all internal assets of only one campaign. The political sabotage itself is news and should be covered as news
Please also remember: People mentioned in these emails have a right to privacy.
And some of the “facts” aren’t facts at all. These days, hacks are primarily fodder for a misinformation campaign to be conducted mostly online. Researchers have already found that pro-Trump Twitter accounts (with #maga, or “make America great again,” in their handles) are heavily promoting Marine Le Pen
Debunking fake news and rumors is a bit like trying to beat back a tar pit by stepping on it again and again: You keep sinking.
Dealing with such misinformation and disinformation campaigns is hard to do
Here’s what I’d suggest: Report aggressively on the fact there is a disinformation campaign. Report it as part of reporting on how the hack is political sabotage. But dig deeper.
Investigate the fake news sites. Look at the Twitter bots that are pushing misinformation from these emails, often in memes or screenshots. Trace their history, their network. Look into who is operating all this; how the coordination is done.
But don’t report their false claims. Rather, only report on claims that you have verified, that are important and factual. Report the truth, report it loudly and repeatedly.
In an era of information glut, what we choose not to report on, what we choose not to amplify, and what misinformation campaign we choose not to surrender to is the name of the game.
If there is wrongdoing to be uncovered, do it on your own terms, at your own pace, through your own discretion
Tomi Engdahl says:
Lucinda Southern / Digiday:
French paper Libération launched fact-checking service on Wednesday, ahead of Sunday’s elections, with readers’ queries answered by fact-checking team — In a last-ditch attempt to steer voters away from misinformation ahead of Sunday’s presidential election, French newspaper Libération
Libération launches fact-checking search engine ahead of France’s election Sunday
http://digiday.com/media/liberation-fact-checking-search-engine/
In a last-ditch attempt to steer voters away from misinformation ahead of Sunday’s presidential election, French newspaper Libération has launched CheckNews, an election search engine.
The tool was released on Wednesday, just days before the vote to decide whether Marine Le Pen or Emmanuel Macron will become president. Readers can submit questions and the fact-checking team will email them links to articles from Libération and other digital publishers that answer their queries. All the questions are posted on the site.
http://checknews.fr/questions
Tomi Engdahl says:
Matt DeRienzo / Medium:
Layoffs at Gannett, Gatehouse, and Digital First Media show the need to support local journalists, not simply local newspapers with corporate owners
Death by 1,000 paper cuts
Gannett’s year-round layoffs hit small-town journalism hardest
https://medium.com/@mattderienzo/death-by-a-thousand-paper-cuts-415f4d26ef9f
As long as there have been big corporate newspaper chains answering to the stock market rather than independent, family ownership, newsrooms have braced for “layoff season” — coming right before the start of a new fiscal year, or immediately following.
A far more brutal round of layoffs comes after a local, family-owned newspaper is acquired by one of these companies. And that’s happened at increasing frequency over the past few years as Gannett and Gatehouse have gone on buying sprees.
Editors are prohibited by small town newspaper publishers — or corporate directive, or both — from writing about the layoffs in their own newsrooms.
But it raises some big questions about Gannett, Digital First (which is laying off newsroom staff in the Bay Area on the heels of a Pulitzer Prize), Gatehouse and other companies who are in the journalism business but are primarily driven by the short-term profit goals of shareholders or hedge funds. They own hundreds of local newspapers that have been vital to their communities — in the past, at least — but whose journalistic vitality or very existence is not necessarily important to, or even part of, the business plan or “exit strategy” of their owners.
“support your newspaper because local journalism is important” isn’t as simple a proposition as it sounds. Because what if the ownership of your local newspaper is the biggest threat to the continued existence of watchdog journalism in your community?
Launching your own local journalism organization, or joining with others to start something, isn’t the easiest route, but can be the most rewarding. LION, which supports local independent online news publishers, stands ready to help.
http://www.lionpublishers.com/
Tomi Engdahl says:
French Authorities Warn Against Spreading Leaked Macron Data
http://www.securityweek.com/french-authorities-warn-against-spreading-leaked-macron-data
French electoral authorities took a hard line Saturday on a hacking attack targeting presidential frontrunner Emmanuel Macron’s campaign, saying anyone who circulates the leaked information could be committing a “criminal offence”.
The electoral commission met following the announcement Friday by the pro-EU centrist’s team that his campaign had been the target of a “massive and coordinated hacking attack” after a flood of internal documents were released online a day before the election.
“The dissemination of such data, which have been fraudulently obtained and in all likelihood may have been mingled with false information, is liable to be classified as a criminal offence,” a commission statement said.
calling the leak “unprecedented in a French electoral campaign”.
Macron’s team said the files were stolen weeks ago when several officials from his En Marche party had their personal and work emails hacked
Tomi Engdahl says:
There Are No “Macron Leaks” in France. Politically Motivated Hacking Is Not Whistleblowing.
https://theintercept.com/2017/05/06/no-macron-leaks-politically-motivated-hacking-not-whistleblowing/
HERE’S SOME NEWS for the alt-right activists in the United States behind a disinformation campaign aimed at getting Marine Le Pen elected president of France by spreading rumors about her opponent, Emmanuel Macron
According to Nicolas Vanderbiest, a Belgian academic who studies social networks, the hacked documents only began to attract attention after they were linked to on Twitter by Jack Posobiec, a Trump supporter who added the misleading hashtag, #MacronLeaks.
That tag, which falsely suggested that the hacked documents had been leaked by a public-spirited whistleblower, rather than stolen by Macron’s political opponents, and contained evidence of wrongdoing, instead of what appears to be mainly a collection of mundane campaign memos, was soon used by a more influential account, WikiLeaks.
The point of the dump, then, appears to be less about providing real evidence to back up the rumors and innuendo Marine Le Pen’s supporters have been spreading about Macron for months, and more a way to reinforce the fact-free speculation
While Macron’s campaign confirmed that some of the documents were genuine, they claimed that the trove also contained forgeries. Among the hacked documents examined by security researchers, some did appear to be obvious fakes
Other researchers reported that the metadata of some documents revealed that they had been edited on computers using Russian-language characters.
Taken together, the effort to spread forged documents and the late release of genuine material hacked from Macron’s campaign, disguised as a “leak,” might be evidence of an intentional disinformation campaign, aimed at misleading voters into thinking real evidence of malfeasance by Macron had been provided to the media but was being suppressed.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Wikipedia has cancer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2017-02-27/Op-ed
In biology, the hallmarks of an aggressive cancer include limitless and exponential multiplication of ordinarily beneficial cells, even when the body signals that further multiplication is no longer needed. The Wikipedia page on the wheat and chessboard problem explains that nothing can keep growing exponentially forever. In biology, the unwanted growth usually terminates with the death of the host. Exponential spending increases can often lead to the same undesirable result in organizations.
In 2005, Wikipedia co-founder and Wikimedia Foundation founder Jimmy Wales told a TED audience:
So, we’re doing around 1.4 billion page views monthly. So, it’s really gotten to be a huge thing. And everything is managed by the volunteers and the total monthly cost for our bandwidth is about US$5,000, and that’s essentially our main cost.
According to the WMF, Wikipedia (in all language editions) now receives 16 billion page views per month. The WMF spends roughly US$2 million a year on Internet hosting and employs some 300 staff. The modern Wikipedia hosts 11–12 times as many pages as it did in 2005, but the WMF is spending 33 times as much on hosting, has about 300 times as many employees, and is spending 1,250 times as much overall. WMF’s spending has gone up by 85% over the past three years.
Sounds a lot like cancer, doesn’t it?
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jim Rutenberg / New York Times:
Advertisers should stop rushing to Facebook and Google, and combat fake news by supporting the real news ecosystem, by giving newspapers their business again — PHILADELPHIA — Hey, America’s Advertisers: You got some good news last week, didn’t you? — Facebook, where you are increasingly placing …
Ad Buyers Have a Say in Whether Real News Survives
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/07/business/media/ad-buyers-have-say-in-survival-of-news.html
Hey, America’s Advertisers: You got some good news last week, didn’t you?
Facebook, where you are increasingly placing your advertising, says it will do more to keep live killings, streaming suicides and terrorist videos off its site.
With any luck the 3,000 new content monitors Facebook says it is hiring will be able to remove those sorts of hand grenades from its news feed before any can roll up next to your ads and blow your public images to kingdom come.
That followed similar news from YouTube, owned by Google, where you are spending even more of your advertising money. It announced it was looking for ways to give advertisers more say over where their ads go, after The Times of London recently discovered an automated system had inadvertently put ads from L’Oréal, Nissan and others into videos featuring the anti-Semitic stylings of a hatemonger whose name I will not publicize here.
The question now is whether all of this will give advertisers the assurance they need to keep sending the overwhelming majority of their new online ad dollars to Google and Facebook.
There is more at stake in the answer than the fortunes of our two online overlords. It will also help determine the fate of the rest of the digital media.
But as those dollars are moving toward Google and Facebook, they are often moving away from quality news and information providers, starving them of the direct digital revenue they need to pay for fact-based news gathering. Real news costs real money; fake news comes cheap.
Tomi Engdahl says:
BBC:
Ahead of June 8 UK general election, Facebook publishes ads in UK papers, including The Times, The Guardian, Daily Telegraph, to raise awareness about fake news
Facebook publishes fake news ads in UK papers
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-39840803?ocid=socialflow_twitter
Facebook has broadened its campaign to raise awareness about fake news, by publishing adverts in the UK press.
The ads, in papers including The Times, The Guardian and Daily Telegraph, carry a list of 10 things to look out for when deciding if a story is genuine.
They include checking the article date and website address, as well as making sure it isn’t intended as satire.
The platform said it had already removed “tens of thousands” of fake Facebook accounts and that systems were now monitoring the repeated posting of the same content or a sharp increase in messaging. Accounts displaying this activity are then flagged, it added.
BBC Panorama investigation to be broadcast later on Monday has found the social network played a decisive role in both the US election and Britain’s EU referendum last year.
Facebook – the secret election weapon
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-39830727
Facebook was a key influencer in the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election and the Brexit vote, according to those who ran the campaigns.
But critics say it is a largely unregulated form of campaigning.
Those in charge of the digital campaigns for Donald Trump’s Republican Party and the political consultant behind Leave EU’s referendum strategy are clear the social network was decisive in both wins.
Political strategist Gerry Gunster, from Leave EU, told BBC Panorama that Facebook was a game changer for convincing voters to back Brexit.
“So if you are on Facebook, I can then match you and put you into a bucket of users that I can then target.”
Mr Coby confirmed the official Trump campaign alone had spent in the region of $70m on Facebook over the election period.
“The way we bought media on Facebook was like no one else in politics has ever done.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Margaret Sullivan / Washington Post:
Prosecuting Julian Assange under the Espionage Act, for publishing leaked information, would create a massive threat to press freedom in the US — Lady Gaga — all in black and wearing a witch’s hat — is interviewing Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he’s been holed up for years.
The government wants Julian Assange in jail. That could hurt the rest of us.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-government-wants-julian-assange-in-jail-thats-bad-for-the-rest-of-us/2017/05/05/c8e153dc-3197-11e7-8674-437ddb6e813e_story.html?utm_term=.59cd949d5f3d
But everyone who cares about the free press in America needs to understand something else, too.
Prosecuting Assange under the Espionage Act for publishing leaked information — which Attorney General Jeff Sessions calls “a priority” — is dangerous. It could turn out to be a major move toward what President Trump has long been threatening to do: punish the independent media in America.
“I’m going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money,” Trump said during the presidential campaign.
That’s not so easy to do. But punishing Assange may begin to accomplish similar goals.
“When governments are trying to restrict press rights of any kind, the inclination is not to go after the most popular kid in the room — it’s to go after the least popular,” Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, told me.
What WikiLeaks has consistently done, Timm said, “is publish information that is true and that the government considers secret. That’s the same thing that the New York Times or The Washington Post does all the time.”
FBI Director James B. Comey seemed to join Sessions in laying the groundwork when he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, describing WikiLeaks’s publication of classified documents as “intelligence porn.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Shan Wang / Nieman Lab:
Post-election in France, the Google-and-Facebook-backed fact-checking project, CrossCheck, is reviewing its work before deciding what’s next — The experiment might be replicated in other countries, but “it’d be showing a lot of hubris to say ‘everybody should now do CrossCheck’ without doing …
The French election is over. What’s next for the Google- and Facebook-backed fact-checking effort there?
http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/05/the-french-election-is-over-whats-next-for-the-google-and-facebook-backed-fact-checking-effort-there/http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/05/the-french-election-is-over-whats-next-for-the-google-and-facebook-backed-fact-checking-effort-there/
The experiment might be replicated in other countries, but “it’d be showing a lot of hubris to say ‘everybody should now do CrossCheck’ without doing the proper social science research based on the data.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
France’s Far-Right Party Banned BuzzFeed And A Dozen Other Outlets From Its Election Night Celebration
https://www.buzzfeed.com/emaoconnor/frances-far-right-party-banned-buzzfeed-and-a-dozen-other?utm_term=.reZJeXdaw0#.iggMzZVg81
The banning happened shortly after BuzzFeed News published investigations exposing racist and anti-Semitic statements made by National Front candidates. The party said there was “very limited space” at the event.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Committee to Protect Journalists:
CPJ Report: a lack of political will to end violence and impunity exposes Mexico as one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists
No Excuse: Mexico must break cycle of impunity in journalists’ murders
https://cpj.org/reports/2017/05/no-excuse-mexico-impunity-journalist-murder.php
Mexico’s press is caught in a deadly cycle of violence and impunity, with journalists in Veracruz state at particular risk of kidnap and murder.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Laura Hazard Owen / Nieman Lab:
The Christian Science Monitor launches Monitor Daily, an emailed daily news digest that will cost $11/month, with the goal of reaching 10K subscribers in a year
The Christian Science Monitor’s new paid, daily product is aiming for 10,000 subscribers in a year
http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/05/the-christian-science-monitors-new-paid-daily-product-is-aiming-for-10000-subscribers-in-a-year/
“The Daily is really in the service of this mission of making people more thoughtful, less neurotic, more calm, and seeing the world through the lens of progress.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Hadas Gold / Politico:
US media outlets were shut out of Trump meeting with Russia’s Sergey Lavrov and Sergey Kislyak, while Russian state news agency TASS was allowed in — On Wednesday morning as controversy swirled over the president abruptly firing his FBI chief amid an investigation of possible ties between …
News outlets shut out of Trump meeting with Russians
http://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2017/05/10/trump-russia-meeting-media-shut-out-238221
On Wednesday morning as controversy swirled over the president abruptly firing his FBI chief amid an investigation of possible ties between Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia, the president met in the Oval Office with none other than Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
But the meeting was closed press, meaning the rotating pool of photographers, reporters and camera operators who follow the president weren’t allowed in. Yet photos of the three laughing and smiling were soon published by the Russian state news agency TASS. The Russian foreign ministry also tweeted photos of the meeting.
Over at CBS, head of standards Al Ortiz sent an email to staff saying they “should and could” use the photos, “but you should say where they came from (Russian government), and we should report that the US pool was kept out of the meeting.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
Facebook says it will now rank sites with “disruptive, shocking or malicious ads” lower in News Feed — Facebook will bury links to low-quality websites and refuse to carry ads pointing to them in a News Feed algorithm changeannounced today. Facebook defines a “low-quality site” …
Facebook downranks News Feed links to crappy sites smothered in ads
https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/10/facebook-fights-foot-fungus-ads/
Facebook will bury links to low-quality websites and refuse to carry ads pointing to them in a News Feed algorithm change announced today. Facebook defines a “low-quality site” as one “containing little substantive content, and that is covered in disruptive, shocking or malicious ads.” This includes hosting pop-up and interstitial ads, adult ads or eye-catching but disgusting ads for products that fight fat or foot fungus.
The change could help Facebook fight fake news, as fakers are often financially motivated and blanket their false information articles in ads.
High-quality sites may see a slight boost in referral traffic, while crummy sites will see a decline as the update rolls out gradually over the coming month
Facebook product manager for News Feed Greg Marra tells me Facebook made the decision based on surveys of users about what disturbed their News Feed experience. One pain point they commonly cited was links that push them to “misleading, sensational, spammy, or otherwise low-quality experiences . . .[including] sexual content, shocking content, and other things that are going to be really disruptive.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
‘Google Is As Close To a Natural Monopoly As the Bell System Was In 1956′
https://search.slashdot.org/story/17/05/10/202255/google-is-as-close-to-a-natural-monopoly-as-the-bell-system-was-in-1956
In terms of market share and profit margins, the big digital platforms, particularly Google and Facebook, enjoy an astounding level of dominance. Google, in effect the world’s largest media company, has an 88 percent market share in search advertising. Facebook (including Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp) controls over 70 percent of social media on mobile devices. Together, the two firms received 85 cents of every new dollar spent in online advertising in the first quarter of 2016. Amazon has an over 70 percent share in the e-book market. Along with Apple and Microsoft, they are now the most valuable companies (in terms of market capitalization) in the world. The rise of digital platforms has had profound political, economic, and social effects, not least of which on the creators of content.
“Google Is as Close to a Natural Monopoly as the Bell System Was in 1956″
https://promarket.org/google-close-natural-monopoly-bell-system-1956/
Media scholar Jonathan Taplin, author of the new book Move Fast and Break Things, on the rent-seeking and regulatory capture of digital platforms.
In 2014, Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel famously proclaimed that “competition is for losers” in an essay published in the Wall Street Journal and in his book (also published in 2014) Zero to One. “If you want to create and capture lasting value, look to build a monopoly,” he advised entrepreneurs, expounding on his view that monopolies are good for innovation and, ultimately, for society at large.
it perfectly captured the underlying philosophy behind the rise of digital platforms like Google, Facebook (whom Thiel was the first outside investor in), and Amazon.
In terms of market share and profit margins, the big digital platforms, particularly Google and Facebook, enjoy an astounding level of dominance. Google, in effect the world’s largest media company, has an 88 percent market share in search advertising. Facebook (including Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp) controls over 70 percent of social media on mobile devices. Together, the two firms received 85 cents of every new dollar spent in online advertising in the first quarter of 2016. Amazon has an over 70 percent share in the e-book market. Along with Apple and Microsoft, they are now the most valuable companies (in terms of market capitalization) in the world.
The rise of digital platforms has had profound political, economic, and social effects, not least of which on the creators of content. While the internet brought immense benefits to consumers of content, the so-called “creative class”—authors, journalists, filmmakers, musicians, artists—has been particularly ravaged by the digital economy.
This ravaging, and its roots in the monopolization of content delivery and data in the hands of a few digital giants, are at the heart of the new book Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by media scholar Jonathan Taplin. In the book, Taplin explores the way in which the internet came to be dominated by a handful of monopoly platforms, and the subsequent capturing of regulators that has since all but ensured their dominance would not be challenged in court.
“The deeper you delve into the reasons artists are struggling in the digital age, the more you see that internet monopolies are at the heart of the problem and that the problem is no longer just for artists,” he writes. “Monopoly control of our data and corporate lobbying are at the heart of this story.”
Q: At the Stigler Center conference on concentration, you called Google “the closest thing to a natural monopoly I’ve seen in my lifetime.” Can you elaborate?
I would say Google is as close to a natural monopoly as the Bell System was in 1956. If you came to me and said “Hey, I want to start a company to compete with Google in search,” I would say you’re out of your mind and don’t waste your energy or your time or your money, there’s just no way. Classic economics would say that if there’s a business in which there are 35 percent net margins, that would attract a huge amount of new capital to capture some of that, and none of that has happened. That tells you there’s something wrong.
The way the Bell System had to give up all its patents in return for being named a natural monopoly, that to me is a potential solution.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook downranks News Feed links to crappy sites smothered in ads
https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/10/facebook-fights-foot-fungus-ads/?utm_source=Daily%20Email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=170511
Tomi Engdahl says:
Machine vs. machine battle has begun to de-fraud the internet of lies
Standards help, too, as we fight to ensure the cost of sharing doesn’t outweigh the benefits
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/10/machine_vs_machine_battle_has_begun_to_defraud_the_internet_of_lies/
A long-ago cartoon in The New Yorker put it plainly: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” If that cartoon had been written today, the caption might have read, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a fraud.”
Scam artists, snake oil salesmen, sock puppets, bot armies and bullies – every time we look up, it seems as though we discover another form of dishonesty, grifting grown to global scale via the magnificent yet terrifying combination of Internet and smartphone.
None of that should surprise us. People are wonderful and horrible. The network we’ve built for ourselves serves both the honest and the liar. But we have no infrastructure to manage a planet of thieves.
Navigating this stuff goes well beyond ‘caveat emptor’, into the darkest secrets of spearphishing and social engineering playing on our higher selves for the basest reasons. I
Security has been stretched to the breaking point. If things continue as they have, the costs of connectivity could begin to outweigh the benefits, and at that point, the post-Web civilisation of sharing and knowledge, already fraying, would unwind comprehensively, as people and businesses withdraw behind defensible perimeters and call it a day.
Insofar as papers presented by the Web’s core research community are a reliable indicator of the future direction for the Web, that future centers on learning how to detect lies.
Detecting false advertisements, bullies, and bots – all of these can be done with machine learning. It can even be applied to a politician’s tweets – to find out if they’ve been fibbing about where they’ve been, and when.
This flurry of research hearkens back to one of the oldest problems in Computer Science – the Turing Test. Can you detect whether someone at the other end of a text-based connection is a person or a computer? What questions do you ask? How do you analyse their responses? Take those same ideas and apply them to a vendor on Alibaba or an account on Twitter – ask the questions, analyse and probe – then decide: truth or lies.
Machines can help us in this battle – but machines will be used on both sides, deceiving and revealing deceit. Yet there is hope: there’s too much money on the table to allow the forces of darkness to gain ascendancy. Chaos is bad for business.