5 ms·

First online media that removed editor for the homepage and put an algorithm to decide which article is more important than other (based on clicks and shares),

by zriha 5y ago

First online media that removed editor for the homepage and put an algorithm to decide which article is more important than other (based on clicks and shares), we got Kardashians, flat earth believers and everything went sideways. As someone who is 15 years in comms, public relations and media relations, for me, influencers were journalists, not some kid with 1 million followers on Instagram or TikTok. Now they are influencing general opinion and not some experienced journalist that is covering one topic for decade. Now, call me old fashioned, but now you have generations of people who are "born" on social media, never go offline and now they are parents, and imagine what kind of role model do they give to their children. It is important for the whole society to engage in critical thinking and build trust. How everything changed, I will give you an example, COVID-19 breaks, nobody knows what's going on, first weeks of lockdown in Europe, and my first source of information was two people I trust, my mother master of pharmacy (MPharm) and my good friend doctor of chemistry, working in pharmaceutical company. They were my first sources, not some obscure web site, WhatsApp group or Facebook group, but people who read scientific journals and researches.

jcbrand 5y ago
> for me, influencers were journalist Journalists have been serving the interests of moneyed elites since well over a hundred years. It's good that they finally have some competition, even if it means that flat earthers also get a voice. > It is important for the whole society to engage in critical thinking and build trust. Critical thinking means listening to diverse viewpoints, weighing up the evidence and the arguments, critically examining them and then forming your own viewpoint. To some extent critical thinking requires mistrust. If you blindly trust someone, why would you critically examine their utterances? IMO it's to some extent good that trust in the old institutions are breaking down. They are no longer equipped to deal with the information age and we need to create new ones. The new ones will need much more transparency in order to engender the trust that was lost. We live in the information age, OSS, wikileaks, public blockchains, wikis... these things aren't going away. Why is there such a huge fight to get the FDA and Pfizer to publish the vaccine data? The FDA wanted it to take 75 years! I think people underestimate the magnitude and scale of the changes awaiting us. Will we still have nation states at the turn of the century? Maybe, but it's not a done deal.
- zriha 5y ago
  > Journalists have been serving the interests of moneyed elites since well over a hundred years. It's good that they finally have some competition, even if it means that flat earthers also get a voice. Well, I wouldn't agree with you, as journalists (and here I mean real journalists) are often members of professional organisation and they have code of conduct. Random people on Facebook or influencers doesn't have that. Thanks to investigative journalists, you have things like Pandora papers. You have to ask yourself where is the line for critical thinking, for example flat earthers - where do we draw the line and when it become apsurd? What we have is that people will now believe in anything, something that we proved and live with for centuries. What we will have, oxygen deniers? They don't recognize oxygen?
  - yunohn 5y ago
    > members of professional organisation and they have code of conduct Laws exist, so there are no crimes? > Thanks to investigative journalists, you have things like Pandora papers. Yes, but that’s their point - not everyone is exposing things, because the elites control the media. Do remember that the Panama Papers whistleblower got mysteriously car-bombed. Here’s a viral modern-day example: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/4/2/17189302/sinclair-broadcast-fake-news-biased-trump-viral-video https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/4/2/17189302/si...
    - tapland 5y ago
      Just a week or so ago in Sweden public service hadn't published any articles on the government having lied about the existence of meeting protocols and memos from covid meetings. It was out of the ordinary seeing them report only after that decision itself became a topic. Not publishing is a very powerful tool, and no journalist is forced by the code of conduct to publish what their employer doesn't want.
    - meheleventyone 5y ago
      > Laws exist, so there are no crimes? More if you don’t trust journalists to be honest when they at least try to establish norms of behaviour you should trust some random person even less. Both are amenable to corruption.
marcus_holmes 5y ago
I'm watching "Dopesick" at the moment, and I'm beginning to understand why people don't trust medical professionals and Big Pharma. Any call to trust journalists should be met with hoots of derision - I've worked with journalists and they (as a general rule) are not interested in "the truth", or in balance, but in creating a good story that will generate interest and go over well on Twitter. There is a fundamental conflict of interest in Western society: people who are supposed to be trustworthy and are trusted to act for the public good are also allowed, even encouraged, to make as much money as they can from that position. Until we solve this, we are right to not trust too much.
- yostrovs 5y ago
  It is indeed ridiculous to point to professional journalists, at this point in time, as seekers of truth. There are some, but the vast majority of our media has little interest in the truth. Instead they're opinion manipulators that are stuck with a communal point of view, and they drive that view onward regardless of reality. That's just how I feel now. Ten years ago I would have trusted the media a lot more.
- geraneum 5y ago
  In most dictatorships, many journalists are usually horribly mistreated. They get jailed, “commit” suicide, or vanish i.e. NK, Iran, Belarus, etc. Unfortunately those governments’ tone and narrative is similar to what you’re saying here (based on my personal experience). Don’t get me wrong, I am not implying you are the same or you have the same intentions. It’s a different context. But this narrative, without rooting out the cause, leads to the rise of those dictatorships. My point is that the problem is the system that incentives a group of people to game it as, you rightly mentioned, in order to be more successful. They have to get the most viewers, reader, clicks, impressions, you name it. It’s all the same. The ways things work lead to emergence of toxic “journalism” and rotten social media platforms. These are side effects.
  - marcus_holmes 5y ago
    I agree (except, having also had personal experience of this situation, I think journalists do overplay the personal danger bit). The cause is exactly what you say: the incentives are all wrong for accurate investigative journalism, which is what we need to keep the powerful uncorrupted. Unfortunately this is because the internet destroyed the business model for news, and there's no putting that genie back in the bottle. We need a new business model for investigative journalism, and while plenty of people are trying (including Substack in the article, who seem to be doing OK), none have really cracked it.

by zriha 5y ago

jcbrand 5y ago

> for me, influencers were journalist Journalists have been serving the interests of moneyed elites since well over a hundred years. It's good that they finally have some competition, even if it means that flat earthers also get a voice. > It is important for the whole society to engage in critical thinking and build trust. Critical thinking means listening to diverse viewpoints, weighing up the evidence and the arguments, critically examining them and then forming your own viewpoint. To some extent critical thinking requires mistrust. If you blindly trust someone, why would you critically examine their utterances? IMO it's to some extent good that trust in the old institutions are breaking down. They are no longer equipped to deal with the information age and we need to create new ones. The new ones will need much more transparency in order to engender the trust that was lost. We live in the information age, OSS, wikileaks, public blockchains, wikis... these things aren't going away. Why is there such a huge fight to get the FDA and Pfizer to publish the vaccine data? The FDA wanted it to take 75 years! I think people underestimate the magnitude and scale of the changes awaiting us. Will we still have nation states at the turn of the century? Maybe, but it's not a done deal.

zriha 5y ago
> Journalists have been serving the interests of moneyed elites since well over a hundred years. It's good that they finally have some competition, even if it means that flat earthers also get a voice. Well, I wouldn't agree with you, as journalists (and here I mean real journalists) are often members of professional organisation and they have code of conduct. Random people on Facebook or influencers doesn't have that. Thanks to investigative journalists, you have things like Pandora papers. You have to ask yourself where is the line for critical thinking, for example flat earthers - where do we draw the line and when it become apsurd? What we have is that people will now believe in anything, something that we proved and live with for centuries. What we will have, oxygen deniers? They don't recognize oxygen?
- yunohn 5y ago
  > members of professional organisation and they have code of conduct Laws exist, so there are no crimes? > Thanks to investigative journalists, you have things like Pandora papers. Yes, but that’s their point - not everyone is exposing things, because the elites control the media. Do remember that the Panama Papers whistleblower got mysteriously car-bombed. Here’s a viral modern-day example: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/4/2/17189302/sinclair-broadcast-fake-news-biased-trump-viral-video https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/4/2/17189302/si...
  - tapland 5y ago
    Just a week or so ago in Sweden public service hadn't published any articles on the government having lied about the existence of meeting protocols and memos from covid meetings. It was out of the ordinary seeing them report only after that decision itself became a topic. Not publishing is a very powerful tool, and no journalist is forced by the code of conduct to publish what their employer doesn't want.
  - meheleventyone 5y ago
    > Laws exist, so there are no crimes? More if you don’t trust journalists to be honest when they at least try to establish norms of behaviour you should trust some random person even less. Both are amenable to corruption.

marcus_holmes 5y ago

I'm watching "Dopesick" at the moment, and I'm beginning to understand why people don't trust medical professionals and Big Pharma. Any call to trust journalists should be met with hoots of derision - I've worked with journalists and they (as a general rule) are not interested in "the truth", or in balance, but in creating a good story that will generate interest and go over well on Twitter. There is a fundamental conflict of interest in Western society: people who are supposed to be trustworthy and are trusted to act for the public good are also allowed, even encouraged, to make as much money as they can from that position. Until we solve this, we are right to not trust too much.

yostrovs 5y ago
It is indeed ridiculous to point to professional journalists, at this point in time, as seekers of truth. There are some, but the vast majority of our media has little interest in the truth. Instead they're opinion manipulators that are stuck with a communal point of view, and they drive that view onward regardless of reality. That's just how I feel now. Ten years ago I would have trusted the media a lot more.
geraneum 5y ago
In most dictatorships, many journalists are usually horribly mistreated. They get jailed, “commit” suicide, or vanish i.e. NK, Iran, Belarus, etc. Unfortunately those governments’ tone and narrative is similar to what you’re saying here (based on my personal experience). Don’t get me wrong, I am not implying you are the same or you have the same intentions. It’s a different context. But this narrative, without rooting out the cause, leads to the rise of those dictatorships. My point is that the problem is the system that incentives a group of people to game it as, you rightly mentioned, in order to be more successful. They have to get the most viewers, reader, clicks, impressions, you name it. It’s all the same. The ways things work lead to emergence of toxic “journalism” and rotten social media platforms. These are side effects.
- marcus_holmes 5y ago
  I agree (except, having also had personal experience of this situation, I think journalists do overplay the personal danger bit). The cause is exactly what you say: the incentives are all wrong for accurate investigative journalism, which is what we need to keep the powerful uncorrupted. Unfortunately this is because the internet destroyed the business model for news, and there's no putting that genie back in the bottle. We need a new business model for investigative journalism, and while plenty of people are trying (including Substack in the article, who seem to be doing OK), none have really cracked it.