14 ms·

Fox News dominates ratings on TV so its not surprising they'd be #1 - there's also the fact this is "engagements" and not click-throughs. I'd wager good 15% of

by volak 8y ago

Fox News dominates ratings on TV so its not surprising they'd be #1 - there's also the fact this is "engagements" and not click-throughs. I'd wager good 15% of these are probably people clicking "Angry" not actually engaging. If you look at "content with the most shares" not surprisingly Reuters and Patch tops the list. OP's headline presumes any algorithm should achieve left/right balance - this is just impossible. There was a good tweet the other day something along the lines of If I Google a headline the results are: * New York Times: Your number of free articles is 0 * Wall Street Journal: Subscription needed * Bloomberg: See this article for $1 * Fox News: Completely free * Breitbart: Completely free Seeing this its no stretch to understand why media struggles

Animats 8y ago
* New York Times: Your number of free articles is 0 ... The Washington Post recently tightened up their paywall, too.
api 8y ago
I understand the economics of course but it seems obvious to me that if real newspapers charge then propaganda and anger porn will rule discourse. If you want some more on the list for balance there are plenty of left wing Breitbarts you could add. Those are free too. BTW I think fear porn / anger porn is an appropriate term. It releases brain chemicals that can be addictive just like sex porn. This explains some of its virality.
- volak 8y ago
  There are left wing Breitbarts just like there's MSNBC for TV. The issue then becomes why these are far less popular. Its not because of a FB algorithm - that's for certain. I can ask everyone in my family if they've heard of Breitbart and 99% will say yes. If I ask if they've heard of Rachael Maddow.. maybe 40%? This is despite both of them engaging heavily in anger porn
  - jerkstate 8y ago
    That's not really a valid comparison. Rachel Maddow is an anchor on MSNBC, which my guess is everyone has heard of. I know what Breitbart is but I don't know any of their writers by name.
    - ModernMech 8y ago
      Also, Rachel Maddow is probably the best example on air of non-fear-based programming. She usually spends the first 10 or so minutes of her show putting the forthcoming topic in historical context, and then proceeds with a rational, calm, and thoughtful examination of the topic. This oftentimes involves verbatim reading of court transcripts for 20 minutes. The majority of her show is a fixed camera on her with a static background graphic behind her. The rest of her show proceeds with interviews of a single guest with relevant topical experience (prosecutors, congresspeople, attorneys etc.) It's what you'd expect from a Rhodes Scholar and Oxford Ph.D. I never leave her program feeling angry, only ever informed. Contrast this with Fox News, where the last time I tuned in to that channel 3 angry people were screaming across a table at each other about how liberals are going to outlaw hamburgers. The camera is flying around like a sportscast, and there's graphics and animations blaring in the background. The people in the room seem to have no relevant credentials as to the topic at hand. Are there any environmental experts at the table? Food science experts? No, there's just "political analysts" and "strategists".
      - Kye 8y ago
        The only reason I don't watch her show anymore is the endless drug company ads.
      - sonnyblarney 8y ago
        The las time I watched Maddow was when there was some news coming out about Trump's possible hotel deal in Moscow, and how it ostensibly was canned in Aug 2017 and not April. She was spinning a huge web of conspiratorial possibilities. She's a brilliant advocate, well informed, and never 'crosses the line' - but she's definitely an advocate. I'd listen to her more if she moved over to NPR or something along those lines.
notacoward 8y ago
That's a really good point about the cost to view. If subscription revenue is paltry, and ad revenue is heading the same way, and public funding is out of the question, then patronage is the only option remaining - and patronage means vulnerability to influence by the patron. So some folks rage about ad-based revenue models, then rage about the outcomes they helped create. They're as dopamine-addicted as anyone.
strulovich 8y ago
Another problem with the article is that it’s missing the data from before the change. To reach a conclusion about a change, we need to look at the data before the change and the actual trend.
geofft 8y ago
I think this is the tweet: https://twitter.com/RogueNotary/status/1101179117574279168 https://twitter.com/RogueNotary/status/1101179117574279168 BTW, I think it is not unreasonable to expect that different models of funding or engagement are differently represented on the left and right sides of politics. Contrary to certain views, the left and the right are not two equal, symmetric, graceful wings of a bird, keeping society in balance: they're two different worldviews and sets of fears and priorities. It's not inherently surprising that one would find their business more profitable with a smaller pool of paying customers, and the other finds more profit in a larger pool of casual visitors to whom to show ads, or that one finds more funding from the rich, or that one's worldview requires deeper and more nuanced storytelling than the other to support its conclusions.
- philipov 8y ago
  That reminds me of how maps can distort information about populations because one side tends to live in smaller high-density urban centers while the other has a much lower density over a larger land area.
  - geofft 8y ago
    http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2016/ http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2016/ is a pretty good example of that. A version of the fourth map on that page ("Here is a map of US counties...") is hanging somewhere in the West Wing; one of the ones at the bottom is perhaps more accurate.
  - leeoniya 8y ago
    https://xkcd.com/1138/ https://xkcd.com/1138/
  - Spooky23 8y ago
    The US Senate makes those maps meaningful. For every other aspect of government, it’s one man one vote. For the Senate, Wyoming has the same representation as New York, even though the population is less than the Rochester metro area.
koboll 8y ago
>I'd wager good 15% of these are probably people clicking "Angry" not actually engaging. Only 15%? I'd guess it's way, way more. Like 90%. News today is primarily headline-driven. You don't have to sit down and watch the evening newscast anymore, you can just scroll through Facebook and see headlines and comments, which almost always drop context and nuance in a way that's engineered to make people upset. In a way, it's probably the most irresponsible aspect of journalism today. The media's ethical priorities are incredibly outdated: if a writer makes a mistake twelve paragraphs into a fifteen paragraph article, it's a major problem requiring a correction. But if an editor appends a headline that actively misleads 100x as many people, no one has any problem with it. The news, in this way, probably misinforms as much as it informs. This is why you get the wildly divergent realities on the right and the left. There's simply no professional awareness of the unbelievably damaging power of headlines that--from a consequentialist perspective--are frequently abject lies.
- kodz4 8y ago
  The correction will come when the News Orgs are limited/disconnected from the engagement feedback loop. News orgs are basically functioning as info amplification nodes on the network. The talking heads have assumed greater importance, than the journos who are painstakingly digging up info. This needs to be revered. The metrics (likes/clicks/views/retweets/upvotes) that drive this behavior of the news orgs have to be rethought. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit etc could get together and propose a standard of what metrics are optimal to cause that reversal and then put them into effect.
- soheil 8y ago
  > There's simply no professional awareness of the unbelievably damaging power of headlines Some would say this is by design and not just on the part of newsmakers but actual politicians on both sides of the spectrum. For the system to work as efficiently as it does a bimodal distribution is probably the best way to achieve that. Every one may be better off at the end thinking both they have a voice, someone taking care of their issues, and elected representatives don't have to struggle to satisfy a never ending range of diversely opinionated electorates.
sametmax 8y ago
It's still unsettling that a country that elected Bush then Trump, considers that any idiot can buy a weapon, has been always at war for the last 50 years (including against the UN will), has the nuclear weapon, has the biggest army in the world, and has huge drugs problem, is molding its vision of the planet through Fox News. Not very reassuring.
- cronix 8y ago
  > a country that elected Bush then Trump > Not very reassuring. You left out 8 years of Obama somewhere in there.
  - sametmax 8y ago
    Obama was not a dangerous president from a European perspective. Bush and Trump on the other hand have been raising a lot of concerns. The first one for lying to his people to get to war and tell the UN to go to hell. The second one has just too many red flags to even begin with.
    - armenarmen 8y ago
      Well he was pretty dangerous from a Libyan Syrian and Yemeni perspective
- hanging 8y ago
  has the biggest army in the world Actually, the seventh biggest. (IISS, quoted in Wikipedia)
xkcd-sucks 8y ago
So people tell me Breitbart is a propaganda machine financed by political manipulators, but Fox is certainly run like a business. What is Fox doing to make their content free that NYT and WSJ can't t?
- massivecali 8y ago
  People believe that paying higher costs for something mean it is of higher value than that which is free. "You get what you pay for." But if you disagree with the content of a site, why would you pay for it in the first place?
- autokad 8y ago
  paywalls probably a huge part of it. I dont click paywalled sites
- rabidrat 8y ago
  Being owned and funded by right-wing billionaires.
- 1337biz 8y ago
  Breitbart's staffing seems also incredibly small. I don't think they produce more than 10 stories per day, with most of them just rewrites of other stories and putting their ideological spin to it. You can do this with maybe 3-5 editors and some freelancers. I suspect they are highly profitable.
- sharkvszombie 8y ago
  Running an extremely profitable cable news channel. Their content isn't free, their web content is free and is paid for by their cable channel.
- Mirioron 8y ago
  I don't know whether Breitbart is propaganda or not. I've only read a handful of articles from it, but from the few I've seen, I like that they source their statements with hyperlinks. Take this one for example: https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2019/03/15/italy-criticized-joining-chinas-belt-road-project/ https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2019/03/15/italy... When the text says that Reuters published an article about a topic they actually link to it. I wish other news sites did the same.
1337biz 8y ago
One could also see that as evidence that traditional media outlets are holding on to an out of date business model and have at the same time lost the middle-right/right audience. The only media catering to their frame of looking at news are Fox or digital-only news services that fully embrace the free-news experience.
Spooky23 8y ago
I’d still be surprised because cable news is dominated by the 55+ demographic. IIRC, less than 20% of viewers are 15-54. Facebook doesn’t sell catheters and old people scooters, so I would guess that their audiences are more diverse.
drewg123 8y ago
What about NPR? BBC? Those are free and fairly unbiased.
- KozmoNau7 8y ago
  BBC has a well-documented centre-right status quo stance. They're pretty consistent about it, so at least you can mentally adjust for it.
sonnyblarney 8y ago
"* New York Times: Your number of free articles is 0 * Wall Street Journal: Subscription needed * Bloomberg: See this article for $1 * Fox News: Completely free * Breitbart: Completely free" But BBC, Huffpo, CNN, NBC/MSNBC et. al. are free, and they actually dominate the list, i.e. those entities and a few others add up to something considerably bigger than Fox. Or Fox + the Mail + Breitbart, for the most part. I think the headline was unnecessarily biased to the extent it doesn't paint the picture we see presented in the actual data, which is actually interesting and not quite so black and white.
NeedMoreTea 8y ago
Surely anything that is not simply ignoring a post is an engagement as far as the algorithm is concerned. Which would include likes and angry etc. Perhaps they get weighted less than a reshare or comment, but I'm sure they're in there. You reacted, however trivially, so you'll now get more of it. You'll get more of it even if you reshare with a comment along the lines of "this is complete rubbish". So the more outrageous rises to the top.

by volak 8y ago

Animats 8y ago

* New York Times: Your number of free articles is 0 ... The Washington Post recently tightened up their paywall, too.

api 8y ago

I understand the economics of course but it seems obvious to me that if real newspapers charge then propaganda and anger porn will rule discourse. If you want some more on the list for balance there are plenty of left wing Breitbarts you could add. Those are free too. BTW I think fear porn / anger porn is an appropriate term. It releases brain chemicals that can be addictive just like sex porn. This explains some of its virality.

volak 8y ago
There are left wing Breitbarts just like there's MSNBC for TV. The issue then becomes why these are far less popular. Its not because of a FB algorithm - that's for certain. I can ask everyone in my family if they've heard of Breitbart and 99% will say yes. If I ask if they've heard of Rachael Maddow.. maybe 40%? This is despite both of them engaging heavily in anger porn
- jerkstate 8y ago
  That's not really a valid comparison. Rachel Maddow is an anchor on MSNBC, which my guess is everyone has heard of. I know what Breitbart is but I don't know any of their writers by name.
  - ModernMech 8y ago
    Also, Rachel Maddow is probably the best example on air of non-fear-based programming. She usually spends the first 10 or so minutes of her show putting the forthcoming topic in historical context, and then proceeds with a rational, calm, and thoughtful examination of the topic. This oftentimes involves verbatim reading of court transcripts for 20 minutes. The majority of her show is a fixed camera on her with a static background graphic behind her. The rest of her show proceeds with interviews of a single guest with relevant topical experience (prosecutors, congresspeople, attorneys etc.) It's what you'd expect from a Rhodes Scholar and Oxford Ph.D. I never leave her program feeling angry, only ever informed. Contrast this with Fox News, where the last time I tuned in to that channel 3 angry people were screaming across a table at each other about how liberals are going to outlaw hamburgers. The camera is flying around like a sportscast, and there's graphics and animations blaring in the background. The people in the room seem to have no relevant credentials as to the topic at hand. Are there any environmental experts at the table? Food science experts? No, there's just "political analysts" and "strategists".
    - Kye 8y ago
      The only reason I don't watch her show anymore is the endless drug company ads.
    - sonnyblarney 8y ago
      The las time I watched Maddow was when there was some news coming out about Trump's possible hotel deal in Moscow, and how it ostensibly was canned in Aug 2017 and not April. She was spinning a huge web of conspiratorial possibilities. She's a brilliant advocate, well informed, and never 'crosses the line' - but she's definitely an advocate. I'd listen to her more if she moved over to NPR or something along those lines.

notacoward 8y ago

That's a really good point about the cost to view. If subscription revenue is paltry, and ad revenue is heading the same way, and public funding is out of the question, then patronage is the only option remaining - and patronage means vulnerability to influence by the patron. So some folks rage about ad-based revenue models, then rage about the outcomes they helped create. They're as dopamine-addicted as anyone.

strulovich 8y ago

Another problem with the article is that it’s missing the data from before the change. To reach a conclusion about a change, we need to look at the data before the change and the actual trend.

geofft 8y ago

I think this is the tweet: https://twitter.com/RogueNotary/status/1101179117574279168 https://twitter.com/RogueNotary/status/1101179117574279168 BTW, I think it is not unreasonable to expect that different models of funding or engagement are differently represented on the left and right sides of politics. Contrary to certain views, the left and the right are not two equal, symmetric, graceful wings of a bird, keeping society in balance: they're two different worldviews and sets of fears and priorities. It's not inherently surprising that one would find their business more profitable with a smaller pool of paying customers, and the other finds more profit in a larger pool of casual visitors to whom to show ads, or that one finds more funding from the rich, or that one's worldview requires deeper and more nuanced storytelling than the other to support its conclusions.

philipov 8y ago
That reminds me of how maps can distort information about populations because one side tends to live in smaller high-density urban centers while the other has a much lower density over a larger land area.
- geofft 8y ago
  http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2016/ http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2016/ is a pretty good example of that. A version of the fourth map on that page ("Here is a map of US counties...") is hanging somewhere in the West Wing; one of the ones at the bottom is perhaps more accurate.
- leeoniya 8y ago
  https://xkcd.com/1138/ https://xkcd.com/1138/
- Spooky23 8y ago
  The US Senate makes those maps meaningful. For every other aspect of government, it’s one man one vote. For the Senate, Wyoming has the same representation as New York, even though the population is less than the Rochester metro area.

koboll 8y ago

>I'd wager good 15% of these are probably people clicking "Angry" not actually engaging. Only 15%? I'd guess it's way, way more. Like 90%. News today is primarily headline-driven. You don't have to sit down and watch the evening newscast anymore, you can just scroll through Facebook and see headlines and comments, which almost always drop context and nuance in a way that's engineered to make people upset. In a way, it's probably the most irresponsible aspect of journalism today. The media's ethical priorities are incredibly outdated: if a writer makes a mistake twelve paragraphs into a fifteen paragraph article, it's a major problem requiring a correction. But if an editor appends a headline that actively misleads 100x as many people, no one has any problem with it. The news, in this way, probably misinforms as much as it informs. This is why you get the wildly divergent realities on the right and the left. There's simply no professional awareness of the unbelievably damaging power of headlines that--from a consequentialist perspective--are frequently abject lies.

kodz4 8y ago
The correction will come when the News Orgs are limited/disconnected from the engagement feedback loop. News orgs are basically functioning as info amplification nodes on the network. The talking heads have assumed greater importance, than the journos who are painstakingly digging up info. This needs to be revered. The metrics (likes/clicks/views/retweets/upvotes) that drive this behavior of the news orgs have to be rethought. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit etc could get together and propose a standard of what metrics are optimal to cause that reversal and then put them into effect.
soheil 8y ago
> There's simply no professional awareness of the unbelievably damaging power of headlines Some would say this is by design and not just on the part of newsmakers but actual politicians on both sides of the spectrum. For the system to work as efficiently as it does a bimodal distribution is probably the best way to achieve that. Every one may be better off at the end thinking both they have a voice, someone taking care of their issues, and elected representatives don't have to struggle to satisfy a never ending range of diversely opinionated electorates.

sametmax 8y ago

It's still unsettling that a country that elected Bush then Trump, considers that any idiot can buy a weapon, has been always at war for the last 50 years (including against the UN will), has the nuclear weapon, has the biggest army in the world, and has huge drugs problem, is molding its vision of the planet through Fox News. Not very reassuring.

cronix 8y ago
> a country that elected Bush then Trump > Not very reassuring. You left out 8 years of Obama somewhere in there.
- sametmax 8y ago
  Obama was not a dangerous president from a European perspective. Bush and Trump on the other hand have been raising a lot of concerns. The first one for lying to his people to get to war and tell the UN to go to hell. The second one has just too many red flags to even begin with.
  - armenarmen 8y ago
    Well he was pretty dangerous from a Libyan Syrian and Yemeni perspective
hanging 8y ago
has the biggest army in the world Actually, the seventh biggest. (IISS, quoted in Wikipedia)

xkcd-sucks 8y ago

So people tell me Breitbart is a propaganda machine financed by political manipulators, but Fox is certainly run like a business. What is Fox doing to make their content free that NYT and WSJ can't t?

massivecali 8y ago
People believe that paying higher costs for something mean it is of higher value than that which is free. "You get what you pay for." But if you disagree with the content of a site, why would you pay for it in the first place?
autokad 8y ago
paywalls probably a huge part of it. I dont click paywalled sites
rabidrat 8y ago
Being owned and funded by right-wing billionaires.
1337biz 8y ago
Breitbart's staffing seems also incredibly small. I don't think they produce more than 10 stories per day, with most of them just rewrites of other stories and putting their ideological spin to it. You can do this with maybe 3-5 editors and some freelancers. I suspect they are highly profitable.
sharkvszombie 8y ago
Running an extremely profitable cable news channel. Their content isn't free, their web content is free and is paid for by their cable channel.
Mirioron 8y ago
I don't know whether Breitbart is propaganda or not. I've only read a handful of articles from it, but from the few I've seen, I like that they source their statements with hyperlinks. Take this one for example: https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2019/03/15/italy-criticized-joining-chinas-belt-road-project/ https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2019/03/15/italy... When the text says that Reuters published an article about a topic they actually link to it. I wish other news sites did the same.

1337biz 8y ago

One could also see that as evidence that traditional media outlets are holding on to an out of date business model and have at the same time lost the middle-right/right audience. The only media catering to their frame of looking at news are Fox or digital-only news services that fully embrace the free-news experience.

Spooky23 8y ago

I’d still be surprised because cable news is dominated by the 55+ demographic. IIRC, less than 20% of viewers are 15-54. Facebook doesn’t sell catheters and old people scooters, so I would guess that their audiences are more diverse.

drewg123 8y ago

What about NPR? BBC? Those are free and fairly unbiased.

KozmoNau7 8y ago
BBC has a well-documented centre-right status quo stance. They're pretty consistent about it, so at least you can mentally adjust for it.

sonnyblarney 8y ago

"* New York Times: Your number of free articles is 0 * Wall Street Journal: Subscription needed * Bloomberg: See this article for $1 * Fox News: Completely free * Breitbart: Completely free" But BBC, Huffpo, CNN, NBC/MSNBC et. al. are free, and they actually dominate the list, i.e. those entities and a few others add up to something considerably bigger than Fox. Or Fox + the Mail + Breitbart, for the most part. I think the headline was unnecessarily biased to the extent it doesn't paint the picture we see presented in the actual data, which is actually interesting and not quite so black and white.

NeedMoreTea 8y ago

Surely anything that is not simply ignoring a post is an engagement as far as the algorithm is concerned. Which would include likes and angry etc. Perhaps they get weighted less than a reshare or comment, but I'm sure they're in there. You reacted, however trivially, so you'll now get more of it. You'll get more of it even if you reshare with a comment along the lines of "this is complete rubbish". So the more outrageous rises to the top.