Challenges Facing Traditional Media in the Digital Age
Newspaper companies are experiencing significant declines in advertisers, readership, and market value, leading to concerns about their mission. The rise of online news sites has created a shift in the media ecosystem, with clickbait and fake news becoming prevalent issues. Traditional gatekeepers are disappearing, raising questions about the quality of news and its impact on democracy. The changing landscape is pushing mainstream news closer to entertainment rather than public service, with real journalism facing a crisis due to failing business models. The influence of social media on information dissemination, particularly during the election, highlights the challenges of navigating a post-truth environment.
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Newspaper companies are losing advertisers, readers, market value, and, in some cases, their sense of mission. (Brown, Losing the News, p. 7). Independent, publicly traded American newspapers have lost forty-two per cent of their market value in the past three years. Only nineteen per cent of Americans between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four claim to look at a daily newspaper. The average age of the American newspaper reader is fifty-five and rising. Since 2004, newspapers were least preferred source for news amongst young people.
Changes in media ecosystem Yet online news sites are growing rapidly and some low quality sites have far more readers than respected news sites. The demand for clickbait created by Facebook creates a temptation for online reporters to become more sensationalist and less careful about the facts. Raises issue of politics of algorithms and filter bubbles
Changes in media ecosystem Many traditional gatekeepers, fact checkers and filters disappear. Is this more democratic? Or something else? The collapse of gatekeepers, agreement on facts, and the emergence of fake news, with Facebook playing a key distribution role. What was your Facebook page like in the months preceding the election?
Mainstream news, in an economic death spiral due to the new social media landscape, edges closer to entertainment and farther from public service? (How many questions about climate change in the presidential debates?) The contraction in the reporting corps, combined with the success of disinformation this year, is making for some sleepless nights for those in Washington who will have to govern in this bifurcated, real-news-fake-news environment. Kristof It s the biggest crisis facing our democracy - the failing business model of real journalism. Senator Claire McCaskill
The First Facebook Election In the last couple of weeks, Facebook, Twitter and other social media outlets have exposed millions of Americans to false stories asserting that: the Clinton campaign s pollster, Joel Benenson, wrote a secret memo detailing plans to salvage Hillary Clinton s candidacy by launching a radiological attack to halt voting (merrily shared on Twitter by Roger Stone, an informal adviser to the Trump campaign); the Clinton campaign senior strategist John Podesta practiced an occult ritual involving various bodily fluids; Mrs. Clinton is paying public pollsters to skew results (shared on Twitter by Donald Trump Jr.); there is a trail of supposedly suspicious deaths of myriad Clinton foes. As Mike Cernovich, a Twitter star, alt-right news provocateur and promoter of Clinton health conspiracies, boasted in last week s New Yorker, Someone like me is perceived as the new Fourth Estate. His content can live alongside that of The Times or The Boston Globe or The Washington Post on the Facebook newsfeed and be just as well read, if not more so. On Saturday he called on a President Trump to disband the White House press corps.
Some journalists and scholars are claiming sites like Facebook may have had a significant impact on the election via fake news (sour grapes?) When faced with claims that news distributed via Facebook may have impacted the election, Zuckerberg at first dismissed this as a pretty crazy idea. Yet almost 50% of Americans get most of their news via Facebook. Facebook s algorithms actively curate the material we see (they are no longer displayed chronologically). It is, in some real sense, a publisher, not just a platform.
Facebook took credit for its role in the Arab Spring, i.e. that it played a vital role in political struggle overseas. In Myanmar misinformation on Facebook reportedly helped fuel ethnic cleansing, creating a refugee crisis. Antonio Garcia-Martinez helped lead Facebook's efforts to target ads. He says his ad team used to joke: It would be so easy to throw an election, just by showing vote reminders to select counties. "There's an entire political team and a massive [Facebook] office in D.C. that tries to convince political advertisers that Facebook can convince users to vote one way or the other. Then Zuck gets up and says, 'Oh, by the way, Facebook content couldn't possibly influence the election.' It's contradictory on the face of it."
In 2010 Facebook conducted an experiment on 61 million users before the midterm elections. One group was shown a go vote message as a plain box, while another group saw the same message with a tiny addition: thumbnail pictures of their Facebook friends who had clicked on I voted. Using public voter rolls to compare the groups after the election, the researchers concluded that the second post had turned out hundreds of thousands of voters. In 2012, Facebook researchers again secretly tweaked the newsfeed for an experiment: Some people were shown slightly more positive posts, while others were shown slightly more negative posts. Those shown more upbeat posts in turn posted significantly more of their own upbeat posts; those shown more downbeat posts responded in kind. Decades of other research concurs that people are influenced by their peers and social networks. All of this renders preposterous Mr. Zuckerberg s claim that Facebook, a major conduit for information in our society, has no influence. (Zeynep Tufekci)
On November 15, 2016, Zuckerberg vowed to weed out fake news. Some Facebook employees are worried about the spread of racist and so-called alt-right memes across the network, according to interviews with 10 current and former Facebook employees. Others are asking whether they contributed to a filter bubble among users who largely interact with people who share the same beliefs. Even more are reassessing Facebook s role as a media company and wondering how to stop the distribution of false information. Some employees have been galvanized to send suggestions to product managers on how to improve Facebook s powerful news feed: the streams of status updates, articles, photos and videos that users typically spend the most time interacting with.
Facebook became a sewer of misinformation. (Harvard s Nieman Lab). I ve come to think that the rise of fake news and of the cheap-to-run, ideologically driven aggregator sites that are only a few steps up from fake has weaponized those filter bubbles. There were just too many people voting in this election because they were infuriated by made- up things they read online. Nieman Lab
One example: Im from a small town in south Louisiana. The day before the election, I looked at the Facebook page of the current mayor. Among the items he posted there in the final 48 hours of the campaign: Hillary Clinton Calling for Civil War If Trump Is Elected. Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President. Barack Obama Admits He Was Born in Kenya. FBI Agent Who Was Suspected Of Leaking Hillary s Corruption Is Dead. (Nieman Lab) http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/11/the-forces-that-drove-this-elections-media-failure-are-likely-to-get-worse/
A fake story claiming Pope Francis actually a refugee advocate endorsed Mr. Trump was shared almost a million times, likely visible to tens of millions, Zeynep Tufekci, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina who studies the social impact of technology, said... Its correction was barely heard. Of course Facebook had a significant influence in this last election s outcome.
Fake News & Digital Literacy 1. Fake news spread through social media platforms was far bigger and more influential than previously thought. One study suggests top fake election news stories generated more total engagement on Facebook than top election stories from 19 major news outlets combined.
Automated AI Twitter swarms or comment- bots whenever topics like climate change, gun control, or other hot-button issues come up? Some evidence for this emerging. In a way these echo fabricated letters to the editor, astroturf groups, and other strategies from the past. However, at present, they are harder to identify and track.
Fake News & Digital Literacy 2. It is becoming an international phenomenon.
The degree of the problem is suggested by the fact that some major political figures could not tell fake news from real news. Two prominent examples were president Trump and General Flynn, the (until recently) national security advisor.
A day after a black activist was kicked and punched by voters at a Donald Trump rally in Alabama, Trump tweeted an image packed with racially loaded and incorrect murder statistics.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/business/media/trump-fake-news.html?_r=0https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/business/media/trump-fake-news.html?_r=0
Why it Matters Reading Fake News, Pakistani Minister Directs Nuclear Threat at Israel.
Why? Why is this all happening now? Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University who has studied the effects of social networks, suggested a few reasons. One is the ubiquity of Facebook, which has reached a truly epic scale. Last month the company reported that about 1.8 billion people now log on to the service every month. Because social networks feed off the various permutations of interactions among people, they become strikingly more powerful as they grow. With about a quarter of the world s population now on Facebook, the possibilities are staggering. When the technology gets boring, that s when the crazy social effects get interesting, Mr. Shirky said. One of those social effects is what Mr. Shirky calls the shifting of the Overton Window, a term coined by the researcher Joseph P. Overton to describe the range of subjects that the mainstream media deems publicly acceptable to discuss.
From about the early 1980s until the very recent past, it was usually considered unwise for politicians to court views deemed by most of society to be out of the mainstream, things like overt calls to racial bias. White ethnonationalism was kept at bay because of pluralistic ignorance, Mr. Shirky said. Every person who was sitting in their basement yelling at the TV about immigrants or was willing to say white Christians were more American than other kinds of Americans they didn t know how many others shared their views. Thanks to the internet, now each person with once-maligned views can see that he s not alone. And when these people find one another, they can do things create memes, publications and entire online worlds that bolster their worldview, and then break into the mainstream. The groups also become ready targets for political figures like Mr. Trump, who recognize their energy and enthusiasm and tap into it for real-world victories.
Mr. Shirky notes that the Overton Window isnt just shifting on the right. We see it happening on the left, too. Mr. Sanders campaigned on an anti- Wall Street platform that would have been unthinkable for a Democrat just a decade ago. The upshot is further unforeseen events. We re absolutely going to get more of these insurgent candidates, and more crazy social effects, Mr. Shirky said. Mr. Trump is just the tip of the iceberg. Prepare for interesting times.
From an era of Truthiness to a Post- truth age? Oxford Dictionaries selected post-truth as 2016's international word of the year. The dictionary defines post-truth as relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.
In a 2008 book, I argued that the internet would usher in a post-fact age. Eight years later, in the death throes of an election that features a candidate who once led the campaign to lie about President Obama s birth, there is more reason to despair about truth in the online age. Why? Because if you study the dynamics of how information moves online today, pretty much everything conspires against truth. Farhad Manjoo, How the Internet Is Loosening Our Grip on the Truth
The internet is distorting our collective grasp on the truth. Polls show that many of us have burrowed into our own echo chambers of information. In a recent Pew Research Center survey, 81 percent of respondents said that partisans not only differed about policies, but also about basic facts. Manjoo.
Fake News: Institutionalized and Weaponized Where hoaxes before were shared by your great-aunt who didn t understand the internet, the misinformation that circulates online is now being reinforced by political campaigns, by political candidates or by amorphous groups of tweeters working around the campaigns, said Caitlin Dewey, a reporter at The Washington Post who once wrote a column called What Was Fake on the Internet This Week. Ms. Dewey s column began in 2014, but by the end of last year, she decided to hang up her fact-checking hat because she had doubts that she was convincing anyone.
What is the top story on your face book feed today is it this?
Critical digital literacy is thus far more important than we had assumed. So what is to be done?
[One] option might be to empower users to improve their online communities through peer- to-peer sanctioning. To test this hypothesis, I used Twitter accounts I controlled ( bots ) to send messages designed to remind harassers of the humanity of their victims and to reconsider the norms of online behavior. I sent every harasser the same message: @[subject] Hey man, just remember that there are real people who are hurt when you harass them with that kind of language
I used a racial slur as the search term because I thought of it as the strongest evidence that a tweet might contain racist harassment. I restricted the sample to users who had a history of using offensive language, and I only included subjects who appeared to be a white man or who were anonymous.
I created two types of bots: white men and black men. To manipulate the race, I used the same cartoon avatar for the bots profile picture and simply changed the skin color. Using a method that has been frequently employed to measure discrimination in hiring, I also gave the bots characteristically white or characteristically black first and last names. Here s an example of Greg, a white bot:
Overall, I had four types of bots: High Follower/White; Low Follower/White; High Follower/Black; and Low Follower/Black. Results? Only one of the four types of bots caused a significant reduction in the subjects rate of tweeting slurs: the white bots with 500 followers. Overall, I found that it is possible to cause people to use less harassing language. This change seems to be most likely when both individuals share a social identity. Unsurprisingly, high status people are also more likely to cause a change.
Many people are already engaged in sanctioning bad behavior online, but they sometimes do so in a way that can backfire. If people call out bad behavior in a way that emphasizes the social distance between themselves and the person they re calling out, my research suggests that the sanctioning is less likely to be effective. Physical distance, anonymity and partisan bubbles online can lead to extremely nasty behavior, but if we remember that there s a real person behind every online encounter and emphasize what we have in common rather than what divides us, we might be able to make the Internet a better place.
But action can be risky a professor and her students created a list of fake sites and criteria to evaluate the credibility of sites was targeted, threatened, and doxxed, and took the material down.
Current issues Russian influence in a host of newly discovered debates from Texas secession to the NFL kneeling controversy to fracking, the IRA (Russia's Internet Research Agency )
According to Max, the IRAs foreign desk had open orders to influence opinions and change the direction of online discussions. He says this department within the agency considered itself above the Russian desk, which he claims is generally bots and trolls. The foreign desk was supposedly more sophisticated. It s not just writing Obama is a monkey and Putin is great. They ll even fine you for that kind of [primitive] stuff, Max told Dozhd. People in his department, he says, were even trained and educated to know the nuances of American social polemics on tax issues, LGBT rights, the gun debate, and more.
IRA staff were tasked with monitoring tens of thousands of comments on major U.S. media outlets, in order to grasp the general trends of American Internet users. Once employees got a sense of what Americans naturally discussed in comment forums and on social media, their job was to incite them further and try to rock the boat. One thing the staff learned quickly was that Americans don t normally talk about Russia: They don t really care about it, Max told Dozhd. Our goal wasn t to turn the Americans toward Russia, he claims. Our task was to set Americans against their own government: to provoke unrest and discontent, and to lower Obama s support ratings.
As time went on, the IRAs themes grew more complex, and staff were even subjected to lessons on U.S. tax policy, so they could expand their trolling to tax-related issues. A separate Analytics desk would supposedly supply his department with Excel files containing hyperlinks to news stories and short summaries of how to comment on these articles, in order to incite American Internet users and derail political discussions.
Search gaming of key industries such as rehab facilities to locksmiths. For profit news machines that will reframe the same story to enrage both sides of a debate.
See the handout (How to spot fake news). This is a compilation of the advice published to help people deal with the fake news epidemic. Does anything seem useful? Can you think of additional solutions, strategies or tools? What should be done?
