8 ms·

Unlike newspaper front pages and magazine covers? (FWIW I agree that FB/Twitter should take responsibility, but I also think journalists should reflect on their

by tqi 6y ago

Unlike newspaper front pages and magazine covers? (FWIW I agree that FB/Twitter should take responsibility, but I also think journalists should reflect on their role as well. After all, it's their headlines being ranked...)

flohofwoe 6y ago
Same basic mechanism, but social media is a lot more efficient because (mis-)information travels much faster and reaches more people in shorter time, so you don't get the "cool down effect" of a slower transport medium.
- kmeisthax 6y ago
  This is only partially true: in prior media eras, low-quality journalism was notorious for doing what Facebook and Twitter are now. We only notice it because we've come out of an almost century long period in which the most effective broadcast mechanism was regulated by the FCC. This is an accident of engineering; the only reason why the FCC was even allowed to what is blatant government censorship is because of the scarcity of radio spectrum. This died the moment cable news networks became widespread. The only restriction on what, say, Fox News, CNN, or MSNBC can publish is their carriage agreement with the cable companies, which usually just dictates genre, not content. Social media is that but laundered across millions of users who "choose" what to share and like out of what platform algorithms recommend. Prior to television, there was radio, which was also regulated under a similar regime. However, newspapers ruled the roost before that, and they had practically no limits on speech save for extremely weak defamation laws. They also were instrumental in spreading a lot of outright bullshit. "Yellow journalism" is an anagram of "clickbait", after all; and the press were perfectly happy to engage in exactly the same tactics we see today... for pretty much the same reasons. Selling lurid descriptions of political foes and foreign threats makes more money than level-headed explanations of the same controversies. I'm not sure if either scenario could be described as "good". The FCC effectively engaged in a soft censorship regime through the means of spectrum scarcity. This meant that every information passed through [the five filters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model) of ownership, advertising, sourcing, flak, and (at the time) anti-Communism. On the other hand, it's clearly obvious that a good subset of any group of political ideologues is either incapable of or uninterested in making level-headed assessments about themselves. Self-critique is heresy in the eyes of someone more extreme than you are, and we live in times where the extremes might be right about at least one thing.
  - flohofwoe 6y ago
    Well, "old media" isn't any better, just less efficient. Goebbels would be a big fan of Facebook and Twitter if he lived today, having a "direct wire" into everybody's brain must be a propagandist's wet dream: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2008/oct/09/radio.hitler.bbc.czechoslovakia https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2008/oct/09/radio.hitler...
    - solosoyokaze 6y ago
      That flow goes two directions though. Anyone can leave a comment on FB/Twitter posts. I would think propagandists would still prefer the one way broadcasting of MSM, instead of allowing dissent to be stuck directly to their message.
      - jvanderbot 6y ago
        Anyone? Or any account? Let's not forget all the sock puppets that can amplify sources at first, after which a few million political enthusiasts can take up the mantle.
      - Rule35 6y ago
        No, they need the genuine man-on-the-street rage posts for the five-minute hate to really be effective. They need to cut to shots of normal people screaming. It's worth it to them even if they have to go through and delete all the compelling counter-narratives. (And in a truly captured society, they'd come and pick them up later for re-education, so you posting would really just be helping them find you.)
- at-fates-hands 6y ago
  Perfect example is the recent Harry/Megan interview with Oprah where social melt down over it. In the interview Megan said she had not talked to her sister in some 10 years and grew up an "only child" and barely knew her. She also said her sister changed her name when she found out she was engaged to Harry. an off handed insult. The counter story is getting very little press right now, allowing her blatant lies to be spread without any scrutiny. Inside Edition interviewed her sister and her sister brought proof she was lying: She said: ‘I don’t know how she can say I don’t know her and she was an only child. We’ve got photographs over a lifespan of us together. So how can she not know me?’ The US broadcaster showed four images of Meghan and Samantha together during the clip. Two were from when the duchess was a baby, another from when she was a small child and the last and most recent from Samantha’s graduation, 13 years ago in 2008. Samantha also disputed Meghan’s claim that she only changed her surname back to Markle after the royal struck up a romance with Harry in 2016. ‘She changed her last name back to Markle… only when I started dating Harry. So I think that says enough,’ Meghan told Oprah. But Samantha hit back: ‘I was a Markle before she was.. Markle has always been my name.’ Samantha then showed Inside Edition her petition to change her name that was dated back to December 1997 and her college diploma, which says Samantha M. Markle. This is a fairly non-political, pop culture example, but it highlights the fact lies spread so much faster than the truth, that actually finding the truth is nearly impossible. For me, there are no facts anymore, its all about the narrative now. Whoever controls the narrative, controls the "truth".
hnnameblah365 6y ago
The enragement alone isn't the concern. Social media can enrage people at a previously unattainable scale and speed, and with less central authority (proxy for trust) than ever before. Newspapers, magazines, and even TV don't measure up across all these contributing dimensions.
- Spivak 6y ago
  Yes they do! There isn’t that much difference nowadays between cable news and edgy YT personalities. Old guard media has realized that they can’t compete with social media so they’re borrowing all the plays. There is news in the newspaper and in the archives of news sites but what’s front and center is outrage bait opinion pieces from large personalities.
  - balls187 6y ago
    Cable News was theater well before the rise of Social Media. Social Media didn't invent "sex* sells." *Sex being the place holder for something that is controversial.
    - rhacker 6y ago
      So true. My brother used to watch Fox News (ehh..) but I mostly avoided it just cause. Anyway I sat down to watch one day and everything had scantily clad women no matter what they were discussing. A lot of the time it was about a strip club that got permits in a city somewhere in small town usa. And the segment would basically focus on dancers (no nudity in the shots) but basically everything BUT an ad for going to said strip club, even though the words themselves was "this is ruining America" - the camera angles and everything was butts, boobs and legs. Anyway that aside. One thing that social media has over cable news is - it's cable not everyone has it, while the internet is pretty much everywhere now.
      - pjc50 6y ago
        The Daily Mail "sidebar of shame" is also a spectacular example of this. They can simultaneously slut-shame celebrities while also advertising where you can buy the outfit in the photo. Fox News notoriously has a preference for blondes: https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2017/feb/20/women-fox-news-dress-alike-republicans-blondes-pundits-ann-coulter-kellyanne-conway-rightwingers https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2017/feb/20/women-fox-ne...
minikites 6y ago
The difference is that Twitter and Facebook "launder" sources by putting their banner at the top. A sensationalist newspaper piece is typically grounded in some reality, but it appears in your "feed" right next to completely unmoored conspiracy theories from your loonier aunts and uncles. To a passive consumer it all blends together. Even for the active consumer, most them don't have enough information literacy skills to tell the difference or critically examine sources.
- rich_sasha 6y ago
  This was apparently a recognised KGB propaganda method abroad. Sponsor semi-respectable news sources, and have them quote arbitrarily unreliable articles from elsewhere. Literally information laundering. I read about it somewhere in an article about ZeroHedge practices, I can't quite find a link now. EDIT: link: https://streetwiseprofessor.com/how-do-you-know-that-zero-hedge-is-a-russian-information-operation-heres-how/comment-page-1/ https://streetwiseprofessor.com/how-do-you-know-that-zero-he...
  - Applejinx 6y ago
    Obviously continuing to this day. Thanks for bringing this up: it does seem to be an effective tactic.
- Viliam1234 6y ago
  Yeah. Newspapers after some time develop reputation. So you buy X, but you wouldn't touch Y, no matter the headline. Then "social media" take a bit of this and a bit of that, and put it all next to each other.
Spivak 6y ago
Everyone should reflect on this role. All media that’s even vaguely political is taking plays out of the abusive relationship playbook of comforting people by validating their fears and turning their anxiety into anger. All because people keep coming back if their only place to feel safe is your outlet which makes them even more angry. All this stupidity because we don’t have a metric for successful journalism other than engagement. “Things are good” doesn’t get clicks.
ClumsyPilot 6y ago
A murderer and a surgeon both cut people open. Clearly the implications are different
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
The difference is that you can't reply to, report, or dogpile a newspaper as much. The outrage on social media is a result from various factions going for each other.
burlesona 6y ago
Of course traditional news has the same problem. “If it bleeds, it leads!” But newspapers are liable for the content they publish, and that keeps misinformation somewhat in check. If Twitter and Facebook etc were held to publisher standards they couldn’t exist in any form like they do today. I kind of think that would be a good thing.
- pjc50 6y ago
  People say this a lot, and forget that (a) libel is pretty limited in the US and (b) expensive everywhere and (c) despite being much heavier in the UK still does not restrain our awful press from campaigns of harassment against celebrities they deem appropriate targets for malicious gossip.
  - ziddoap 6y ago
    I hear this sentiment all of the time as well, not just restricted to cases of libel but it seems most common with libel. It doesn't matter if something is written down as being against the law/regulations/whatever if the punishment for breaking that law/regulation is toothless, seldom applied, or so expensive to get proceedings started that 90% of the population is priced-out of pursuing their case from the start. "Just sue them if they write something incorrect/defamatory/etc" is not really a realistic option for the majority of people, not a guarantee of anything happening or reforming, and generally the damage has already been caused. No one really cares about a retraction issued a few months after a story is released, we've all moved on to the next outrage-inducing story.
    - pjc50 6y ago
      Indeed. It costs about a car to engage in the action, and potentially a house if you lose.
- solosoyokaze 6y ago
  I would say The New York Times falsely claiming that Iraq had WMD and helping to champion the Iraq war was far more damaging than anything that has happened on social media. The MSM may steer clear of the obvious falsehoods like vaportrails/5g mind control, but the misinformation they do provide is extra dangerous, especially when it's a joint effort with the government.
pjc50 6y ago
Both/and. It's a feedback loop, as well; the press are in it for the shares. Anyone with the slightest exposure to UK news media will have been confronted with this very recently; the Oprah interview with Harry and Meghan alleging the press campaign against them, subsequent back-and-forth, and finally Piers Morgan getting himself sacked for storming off his own TV show after being contradicted by his own weatherman. The latter event is both pure old-media failure and an example of the kind of sheer derangement that being a participant in the culture wars can induce in people. At least he wasn't storming the government.
- Rule35 6y ago
  Ehh. He's either in the culture war, or he believes what he says. If you're a Brit you probably see the royal family fairly positively. (Many brits don't like them as people, but think they're handling the transfer of power well, etc.) His factual correctness and his sincerity are two different things. Who knows what MM is, at heart, but if he has reason to see her negatively why shouldn't he lament her influence over his country? Is there a time-limit, where you're only allowed to criticize someone for 5y, and so when it hit 6 his opinion was officially stale?
  - pjc50 6y ago
    > His factual correctness and his sincerity I notice you're not making this argument about MM. > Is there a time-limit, where you're only allowed to criticize someone for 5y, and so when it hit 6 his opinion was officially stale? I was referring to events over the past few days. I don't really want to relitigate this here with a green account, only to observe that you too have come in to play outrage and culture war.
    - Rule35 6y ago
      > > His factual correctness and his sincerity > I notice you're not making this argument about MM. I'm not talking about MM at all because your post was about PM. And it's not an argument, it's an observation, and it's true about everyone - that correctness and sincerity are not the same. > I was referring to events over the past few days. Right, but those events also have a history. What's an issue of a few days to us, watching from outside, is someone else's years-long story.

by tqi 6y ago

flohofwoe 6y ago

Same basic mechanism, but social media is a lot more efficient because (mis-)information travels much faster and reaches more people in shorter time, so you don't get the "cool down effect" of a slower transport medium.

kmeisthax 6y ago
This is only partially true: in prior media eras, low-quality journalism was notorious for doing what Facebook and Twitter are now. We only notice it because we've come out of an almost century long period in which the most effective broadcast mechanism was regulated by the FCC. This is an accident of engineering; the only reason why the FCC was even allowed to what is blatant government censorship is because of the scarcity of radio spectrum. This died the moment cable news networks became widespread. The only restriction on what, say, Fox News, CNN, or MSNBC can publish is their carriage agreement with the cable companies, which usually just dictates genre, not content. Social media is that but laundered across millions of users who "choose" what to share and like out of what platform algorithms recommend. Prior to television, there was radio, which was also regulated under a similar regime. However, newspapers ruled the roost before that, and they had practically no limits on speech save for extremely weak defamation laws. They also were instrumental in spreading a lot of outright bullshit. "Yellow journalism" is an anagram of "clickbait", after all; and the press were perfectly happy to engage in exactly the same tactics we see today... for pretty much the same reasons. Selling lurid descriptions of political foes and foreign threats makes more money than level-headed explanations of the same controversies. I'm not sure if either scenario could be described as "good". The FCC effectively engaged in a soft censorship regime through the means of spectrum scarcity. This meant that every information passed through [the five filters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model) of ownership, advertising, sourcing, flak, and (at the time) anti-Communism. On the other hand, it's clearly obvious that a good subset of any group of political ideologues is either incapable of or uninterested in making level-headed assessments about themselves. Self-critique is heresy in the eyes of someone more extreme than you are, and we live in times where the extremes might be right about at least one thing.
- flohofwoe 6y ago
  Well, "old media" isn't any better, just less efficient. Goebbels would be a big fan of Facebook and Twitter if he lived today, having a "direct wire" into everybody's brain must be a propagandist's wet dream: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2008/oct/09/radio.hitler.bbc.czechoslovakia https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2008/oct/09/radio.hitler...
  - solosoyokaze 6y ago
    That flow goes two directions though. Anyone can leave a comment on FB/Twitter posts. I would think propagandists would still prefer the one way broadcasting of MSM, instead of allowing dissent to be stuck directly to their message.
    - jvanderbot 6y ago
      Anyone? Or any account? Let's not forget all the sock puppets that can amplify sources at first, after which a few million political enthusiasts can take up the mantle.
    - Rule35 6y ago
      No, they need the genuine man-on-the-street rage posts for the five-minute hate to really be effective. They need to cut to shots of normal people screaming. It's worth it to them even if they have to go through and delete all the compelling counter-narratives. (And in a truly captured society, they'd come and pick them up later for re-education, so you posting would really just be helping them find you.)
at-fates-hands 6y ago
Perfect example is the recent Harry/Megan interview with Oprah where social melt down over it. In the interview Megan said she had not talked to her sister in some 10 years and grew up an "only child" and barely knew her. She also said her sister changed her name when she found out she was engaged to Harry. an off handed insult. The counter story is getting very little press right now, allowing her blatant lies to be spread without any scrutiny. Inside Edition interviewed her sister and her sister brought proof she was lying: She said: ‘I don’t know how she can say I don’t know her and she was an only child. We’ve got photographs over a lifespan of us together. So how can she not know me?’ The US broadcaster showed four images of Meghan and Samantha together during the clip. Two were from when the duchess was a baby, another from when she was a small child and the last and most recent from Samantha’s graduation, 13 years ago in 2008. Samantha also disputed Meghan’s claim that she only changed her surname back to Markle after the royal struck up a romance with Harry in 2016. ‘She changed her last name back to Markle… only when I started dating Harry. So I think that says enough,’ Meghan told Oprah. But Samantha hit back: ‘I was a Markle before she was.. Markle has always been my name.’ Samantha then showed Inside Edition her petition to change her name that was dated back to December 1997 and her college diploma, which says Samantha M. Markle. This is a fairly non-political, pop culture example, but it highlights the fact lies spread so much faster than the truth, that actually finding the truth is nearly impossible. For me, there are no facts anymore, its all about the narrative now. Whoever controls the narrative, controls the "truth".

hnnameblah365 6y ago

The enragement alone isn't the concern. Social media can enrage people at a previously unattainable scale and speed, and with less central authority (proxy for trust) than ever before. Newspapers, magazines, and even TV don't measure up across all these contributing dimensions.

Spivak 6y ago
Yes they do! There isn’t that much difference nowadays between cable news and edgy YT personalities. Old guard media has realized that they can’t compete with social media so they’re borrowing all the plays. There is news in the newspaper and in the archives of news sites but what’s front and center is outrage bait opinion pieces from large personalities.
- balls187 6y ago
  Cable News was theater well before the rise of Social Media. Social Media didn't invent "sex* sells." *Sex being the place holder for something that is controversial.
  - rhacker 6y ago
    So true. My brother used to watch Fox News (ehh..) but I mostly avoided it just cause. Anyway I sat down to watch one day and everything had scantily clad women no matter what they were discussing. A lot of the time it was about a strip club that got permits in a city somewhere in small town usa. And the segment would basically focus on dancers (no nudity in the shots) but basically everything BUT an ad for going to said strip club, even though the words themselves was "this is ruining America" - the camera angles and everything was butts, boobs and legs. Anyway that aside. One thing that social media has over cable news is - it's cable not everyone has it, while the internet is pretty much everywhere now.
    - pjc50 6y ago
      The Daily Mail "sidebar of shame" is also a spectacular example of this. They can simultaneously slut-shame celebrities while also advertising where you can buy the outfit in the photo. Fox News notoriously has a preference for blondes: https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2017/feb/20/women-fox-news-dress-alike-republicans-blondes-pundits-ann-coulter-kellyanne-conway-rightwingers https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2017/feb/20/women-fox-ne...

minikites 6y ago

The difference is that Twitter and Facebook "launder" sources by putting their banner at the top. A sensationalist newspaper piece is typically grounded in some reality, but it appears in your "feed" right next to completely unmoored conspiracy theories from your loonier aunts and uncles. To a passive consumer it all blends together. Even for the active consumer, most them don't have enough information literacy skills to tell the difference or critically examine sources.

rich_sasha 6y ago
This was apparently a recognised KGB propaganda method abroad. Sponsor semi-respectable news sources, and have them quote arbitrarily unreliable articles from elsewhere. Literally information laundering. I read about it somewhere in an article about ZeroHedge practices, I can't quite find a link now. EDIT: link: https://streetwiseprofessor.com/how-do-you-know-that-zero-hedge-is-a-russian-information-operation-heres-how/comment-page-1/ https://streetwiseprofessor.com/how-do-you-know-that-zero-he...
- Applejinx 6y ago
  Obviously continuing to this day. Thanks for bringing this up: it does seem to be an effective tactic.
Viliam1234 6y ago
Yeah. Newspapers after some time develop reputation. So you buy X, but you wouldn't touch Y, no matter the headline. Then "social media" take a bit of this and a bit of that, and put it all next to each other.

Spivak 6y ago

Everyone should reflect on this role. All media that’s even vaguely political is taking plays out of the abusive relationship playbook of comforting people by validating their fears and turning their anxiety into anger. All because people keep coming back if their only place to feel safe is your outlet which makes them even more angry. All this stupidity because we don’t have a metric for successful journalism other than engagement. “Things are good” doesn’t get clicks.

ClumsyPilot 6y ago

A murderer and a surgeon both cut people open. Clearly the implications are different

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

The difference is that you can't reply to, report, or dogpile a newspaper as much. The outrage on social media is a result from various factions going for each other.

burlesona 6y ago

Of course traditional news has the same problem. “If it bleeds, it leads!” But newspapers are liable for the content they publish, and that keeps misinformation somewhat in check. If Twitter and Facebook etc were held to publisher standards they couldn’t exist in any form like they do today. I kind of think that would be a good thing.

pjc50 6y ago
People say this a lot, and forget that (a) libel is pretty limited in the US and (b) expensive everywhere and (c) despite being much heavier in the UK still does not restrain our awful press from campaigns of harassment against celebrities they deem appropriate targets for malicious gossip.
- ziddoap 6y ago
  I hear this sentiment all of the time as well, not just restricted to cases of libel but it seems most common with libel. It doesn't matter if something is written down as being against the law/regulations/whatever if the punishment for breaking that law/regulation is toothless, seldom applied, or so expensive to get proceedings started that 90% of the population is priced-out of pursuing their case from the start. "Just sue them if they write something incorrect/defamatory/etc" is not really a realistic option for the majority of people, not a guarantee of anything happening or reforming, and generally the damage has already been caused. No one really cares about a retraction issued a few months after a story is released, we've all moved on to the next outrage-inducing story.
  - pjc50 6y ago
    Indeed. It costs about a car to engage in the action, and potentially a house if you lose.
solosoyokaze 6y ago
I would say The New York Times falsely claiming that Iraq had WMD and helping to champion the Iraq war was far more damaging than anything that has happened on social media. The MSM may steer clear of the obvious falsehoods like vaportrails/5g mind control, but the misinformation they do provide is extra dangerous, especially when it's a joint effort with the government.

pjc50 6y ago

Both/and. It's a feedback loop, as well; the press are in it for the shares. Anyone with the slightest exposure to UK news media will have been confronted with this very recently; the Oprah interview with Harry and Meghan alleging the press campaign against them, subsequent back-and-forth, and finally Piers Morgan getting himself sacked for storming off his own TV show after being contradicted by his own weatherman. The latter event is both pure old-media failure and an example of the kind of sheer derangement that being a participant in the culture wars can induce in people. At least he wasn't storming the government.

Rule35 6y ago
Ehh. He's either in the culture war, or he believes what he says. If you're a Brit you probably see the royal family fairly positively. (Many brits don't like them as people, but think they're handling the transfer of power well, etc.) His factual correctness and his sincerity are two different things. Who knows what MM is, at heart, but if he has reason to see her negatively why shouldn't he lament her influence over his country? Is there a time-limit, where you're only allowed to criticize someone for 5y, and so when it hit 6 his opinion was officially stale?
- pjc50 6y ago
  > His factual correctness and his sincerity I notice you're not making this argument about MM. > Is there a time-limit, where you're only allowed to criticize someone for 5y, and so when it hit 6 his opinion was officially stale? I was referring to events over the past few days. I don't really want to relitigate this here with a green account, only to observe that you too have come in to play outrage and culture war.
  - Rule35 6y ago
    > > His factual correctness and his sincerity > I notice you're not making this argument about MM. I'm not talking about MM at all because your post was about PM. And it's not an argument, it's an observation, and it's true about everyone - that correctness and sincerity are not the same. > I was referring to events over the past few days. Right, but those events also have a history. What's an issue of a few days to us, watching from outside, is someone else's years-long story.