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Google, Youtube and Facebook aren't news producers, they aggregate and provide content in feed form. First order journalism, the people that actually point the

Google, Youtube and Facebook aren't news producers, they aggregate and provide content in feed form. First order journalism, the people that actually point the cameras at things are largely the mentioned commercial institutions, the rest is commentary.

propagandist 5y ago
- People are spending all (slight hyperbole) their time on those platforms, - The news is informed by the content on the platforms The platforms control the information and they control what people see as the "news".
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  The previous poster does have a point though. A lot of the 'news' people see on Facebook and the like are simply shared from other news outlets on facebook. Facebook doesn't produce the news but it disseminates it. Because of this some countries even wanted to impose a facebook tax. Like Australia.
  - propagandist 5y ago
    Sure, but they are also the arbiter of truth now. FB tried to be purely a platform but society has asked them to "annotate" fake news or propaganda. So FB is now playing an editorial role. However we got here, it's not a great place to be in. We have massive networks that we cannot escape which are actively firewalling information.
    - harry8 5y ago
      >FB tried to be purely a platform That is /so/ much nonsense. Doesn't matter how you editorialize by controlling what people see including with a trained algorithm optimized for "engagement" that tends to be pretty similar to "outrage." The second you "promote" a wider engagement on any article or topic at the expense of another you aren't pure or anything like it. And we'd be heroically naive if we really were willing to bet our own lives on someone not "tweaking" the algo for their own beliefs along the chain somewhere. I know I would if I saw too many pro-nazi content promoted, for example and that is editorial with nothing at all "pure" about it. FB has never, ever been a "purely a platform" other than in their own PR releases. Censoring because politicians tell them to do it is a wholly different issue on top of that.
      - propagandist 5y ago
        Some people don't need the FB algos to get all wound up :)
    - daniel-cussen 5y ago
      It's always been like that, from the very beginning. They never just let true laissez-faire with the news on the site, like they pretended to sometimes and it looked like a story "went viral" like out of control. The only time I remember a story really getting out of the control of the editor, was on reddit in the thread about tips waiters received from a certain race. Just hit a nerve like what the fuck, like they found out the conspiracy behind Santa Claus, the existence of stereotypes doesn't guarantee that reality is to the exact contrary. Patterns emerged with no machine learning, just thousands of screams into the void, which wasn't quite that empty a void. Those waiters weren't alone, and this was back when reddit was less bot-infested, it always has been and it always hasn't been, but back then it was harder to do a robotic painfully sincere tone. I do remember one argument against the current of that thread, one among hundreds, like Social Justice short circuit. If you tell someone it's just him with 9 bad experiences for every 1 good experience, just statistics, and for that to work of course you need them not to know more statistics like statistical estimates for the probability the statistics report can be proven to be a lie with very little data, you must never let them talk to anyone about their uniquely unlucky misfortune. You can make people really stupid by teaching them bad statistics but in groups it doesn't work. So on that note, Facebook and all the others have to keep an eye out and always moderate. And you know? I did that myself once, there was a site connecting travelers to people who wanted stuff from abroad, like a marketplace, and nobody moderated it for a while, I finally go and it's disgusting, all scammers, buyers and sellers everybody is a scammer, like I needed to blacklist the user database and start from nothing. So if I had done some regex to look for blatant stuff, I might have been able to salvage more of it. I suppose the unmoderated self-image Facebook (and everyone else) tries to project, beyond being about reducing wage moneys by getting "users" to "generate" "content", is that it looks fresher, more meritocratic, anything could rise to the top, nowadays the obsession with virality is much less than six years ago but everyone buys into the fifteen minutes of fame thing.
swayvil 5y ago
Yeah but they choose what, from all that produced stuff, you will see and not-see. Which is a pretty big deal. Maybe bigger control than the producers.
- DavidPiper 5y ago
  Right, but they are ultimately choosing from primarily those producers. Independent creators are a drop in the ocean.
- arrosenberg 5y ago
  Agree. The problem is the producers have been allowed to vertically align a distribution channel (Disney+, Paramount+, HBOMax, etc.), so it's not clearly distinguished. Google and Facebook are distributors of content, and the distributors control what people see.
- ethanbond 5y ago
  Okay, so +2 or +3 more companies, now we're up to 9. The article still stands.
kodah 5y ago
There's two sources of bias in this pipeline: There's the production end, which this article covers. Then there's the distribution end, which is where tech companies come in. Both are problematic in different ways.
mc32 5y ago
More and more footage is being lifted from the likes of Twitter, etc., not to mention citizen journalism. That content is mediated by Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, etc.
frankfrankfrank 5y ago
I agree with you, but we also need to agree that even if you include G, YT, F; that probably would up the percentage to even higher levels and I would argue that they should be included in the cartel behavior because they and the likes of Twitter are all heavy censors/“publishers” that make it explicit how far they are willing to go to control what supposedly sovereign adults are allowed/can see.
- Blahah 5y ago
  What do you mean by "sovereign adults"? Very few people have sovereignty in most senses, while humans of all ages have it in the consciousness sense.
hsnewman 5y ago
They control what you read.
- vkou 5y ago
  They are a filtering function applied on top of primary content producers. However, in the case of these six primary content producers, the distributors don't really do any filtering. So, yes, the premise of the OP is correct. Six companies produce ~all of the media you consume, with a couple of distributor companies that deliver that media to you. If you're concerned about homogeneity of thought in media, you should be looking at the market share of the primary producers.
  - reshie 5y ago
    but they have editors. filters have always been around in one form or another.
- rossjudson 5y ago
  I've never understood this statement. Do you have any trusted sources of news? Are you not able to read them directly on the web? Maybe you're just saying you want news about X, and you're not sure where to find a source that can tell you about that, and this is where you find "control". What kind of control are you talking about here? Deliberate? Accidental? Algorithmic? Censoring?
stuckkeys 5y ago
I think he meant “news” are shared via those social platforms. I get his point of view.
jollybean 5y ago
? 'What We Think' is not a function of what is writ or recorded, rather where the lens is focused. Google is the 'camera'. They can ostensibly focus it anywhere with predictable results. If I wanted power, I'd rather be Google than the NYT.
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
To be fair, the word used was "control". The HN title is, once again, distorting the content of the submission. The author's discussion is focused on media consolidation and the slow death of local news, not Big Tech's control over what people consume. (Though she does cite Big Tech's practice of censoring independent news sources.)
- _aavaa_ 5y ago
  I don’t think distorting is the right term as the HN title is the subtitle for the article.
  - 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
    Yes, but without the title preceding it, the statement loses its context. It baffles me when people want to override authors on titles. Sure, sometimes it might make sense to do so, but most of the time the author is the person in the best position to present and explain what she has written.
    - _aavaa_ 5y ago
      "The Monopoly On Your Mind, Part 1: Consolidation Craze & Illusion of Choice" I don't see what context this adds.
      - 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
        I do. If this was the HN title I would not necessarily think about Big Tech. Then when I began reading the blog post I would quickly see it is about media consolidation and the decline of local news, not about Big Tech intermediary (middleman) control over the delivery of media that some other entity has produced. This is only Part 1, so there may be more about Big Tech in Parts 2 and 3.
- griffinkelly 5y ago
  Great documentary on the decline of local news and battle against social media that aired on PBS about Storm Lake, Iowa: https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/documentaries/storm-lake/ https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/documentaries/storm-lake...
yosito 5y ago
Judging by personal experience a large portion of humanity gets their worldview from memes which are most certainly not produced by the aforementioned institutions.
- jesusofnazarath 5y ago
faeriechangling 5y ago
The people who actually point their camera at things are everyday people with smartphones. The majority of "news" content I've seen taken with a camera over the last few years was not been taken by a professional journalist. The George Floyd story, maybe the story of the decade revolved around footage taken with a smartphone camera.
- edmcnulty101 5y ago
  It was made huge by those 6 corporations. Not one person with a camera and a YouTube channel.
- t0bia_s 5y ago
  Irony of fate is that our history is documented on vertical videos. For me it is proof that it is only about consumerism, quantity and emotions.
- sofixa 5y ago
  > The George Floyd story, maybe the story of the decade Pandemic with millions of dead, war in Ukraine, huge scale corruption ( Pandora papers), COP26, an attempted coup in a supposedly liberal democracy to name just a few things from this decade, and a racially motivated murder by a policeman in the US is your pick for "the story of the decade" 2 years in? Sorry to burst your bubble but the vast majority of the planet doesn't care that much (beyond initial compassion) about racial problems in the US.
  - faeriechangling 5y ago
    Ukraine war is a bigger story, just slipped my mind. The Floyd story is bigger than a murder though, at least 19 people died in the ensuing protests, over 10 thousand were arrested, and there was a few billion in property damage.
jononor 5y ago
With news services like Reuters, Associated Press etc many stories published by a newspaper is also just aggregation/curation/presentation.

propagandist 5y ago

- People are spending all (slight hyperbole) their time on those platforms, - The news is informed by the content on the platforms The platforms control the information and they control what people see as the "news".

GekkePrutser 5y ago
The previous poster does have a point though. A lot of the 'news' people see on Facebook and the like are simply shared from other news outlets on facebook. Facebook doesn't produce the news but it disseminates it. Because of this some countries even wanted to impose a facebook tax. Like Australia.
- propagandist 5y ago
  Sure, but they are also the arbiter of truth now. FB tried to be purely a platform but society has asked them to "annotate" fake news or propaganda. So FB is now playing an editorial role. However we got here, it's not a great place to be in. We have massive networks that we cannot escape which are actively firewalling information.
  - harry8 5y ago
    >FB tried to be purely a platform That is /so/ much nonsense. Doesn't matter how you editorialize by controlling what people see including with a trained algorithm optimized for "engagement" that tends to be pretty similar to "outrage." The second you "promote" a wider engagement on any article or topic at the expense of another you aren't pure or anything like it. And we'd be heroically naive if we really were willing to bet our own lives on someone not "tweaking" the algo for their own beliefs along the chain somewhere. I know I would if I saw too many pro-nazi content promoted, for example and that is editorial with nothing at all "pure" about it. FB has never, ever been a "purely a platform" other than in their own PR releases. Censoring because politicians tell them to do it is a wholly different issue on top of that.
    - propagandist 5y ago
      Some people don't need the FB algos to get all wound up :)
  - daniel-cussen 5y ago
    It's always been like that, from the very beginning. They never just let true laissez-faire with the news on the site, like they pretended to sometimes and it looked like a story "went viral" like out of control. The only time I remember a story really getting out of the control of the editor, was on reddit in the thread about tips waiters received from a certain race. Just hit a nerve like what the fuck, like they found out the conspiracy behind Santa Claus, the existence of stereotypes doesn't guarantee that reality is to the exact contrary. Patterns emerged with no machine learning, just thousands of screams into the void, which wasn't quite that empty a void. Those waiters weren't alone, and this was back when reddit was less bot-infested, it always has been and it always hasn't been, but back then it was harder to do a robotic painfully sincere tone. I do remember one argument against the current of that thread, one among hundreds, like Social Justice short circuit. If you tell someone it's just him with 9 bad experiences for every 1 good experience, just statistics, and for that to work of course you need them not to know more statistics like statistical estimates for the probability the statistics report can be proven to be a lie with very little data, you must never let them talk to anyone about their uniquely unlucky misfortune. You can make people really stupid by teaching them bad statistics but in groups it doesn't work. So on that note, Facebook and all the others have to keep an eye out and always moderate. And you know? I did that myself once, there was a site connecting travelers to people who wanted stuff from abroad, like a marketplace, and nobody moderated it for a while, I finally go and it's disgusting, all scammers, buyers and sellers everybody is a scammer, like I needed to blacklist the user database and start from nothing. So if I had done some regex to look for blatant stuff, I might have been able to salvage more of it. I suppose the unmoderated self-image Facebook (and everyone else) tries to project, beyond being about reducing wage moneys by getting "users" to "generate" "content", is that it looks fresher, more meritocratic, anything could rise to the top, nowadays the obsession with virality is much less than six years ago but everyone buys into the fifteen minutes of fame thing.

swayvil 5y ago

Yeah but they choose what, from all that produced stuff, you will see and not-see. Which is a pretty big deal. Maybe bigger control than the producers.

DavidPiper 5y ago
Right, but they are ultimately choosing from primarily those producers. Independent creators are a drop in the ocean.
arrosenberg 5y ago
Agree. The problem is the producers have been allowed to vertically align a distribution channel (Disney+, Paramount+, HBOMax, etc.), so it's not clearly distinguished. Google and Facebook are distributors of content, and the distributors control what people see.
ethanbond 5y ago
Okay, so +2 or +3 more companies, now we're up to 9. The article still stands.

kodah 5y ago

There's two sources of bias in this pipeline: There's the production end, which this article covers. Then there's the distribution end, which is where tech companies come in. Both are problematic in different ways.

mc32 5y ago

More and more footage is being lifted from the likes of Twitter, etc., not to mention citizen journalism. That content is mediated by Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, etc.

frankfrankfrank 5y ago

I agree with you, but we also need to agree that even if you include G, YT, F; that probably would up the percentage to even higher levels and I would argue that they should be included in the cartel behavior because they and the likes of Twitter are all heavy censors/“publishers” that make it explicit how far they are willing to go to control what supposedly sovereign adults are allowed/can see.

Blahah 5y ago
What do you mean by "sovereign adults"? Very few people have sovereignty in most senses, while humans of all ages have it in the consciousness sense.

hsnewman 5y ago

They control what you read.

vkou 5y ago
They are a filtering function applied on top of primary content producers. However, in the case of these six primary content producers, the distributors don't really do any filtering. So, yes, the premise of the OP is correct. Six companies produce ~all of the media you consume, with a couple of distributor companies that deliver that media to you. If you're concerned about homogeneity of thought in media, you should be looking at the market share of the primary producers.
- reshie 5y ago
  but they have editors. filters have always been around in one form or another.
rossjudson 5y ago
I've never understood this statement. Do you have any trusted sources of news? Are you not able to read them directly on the web? Maybe you're just saying you want news about X, and you're not sure where to find a source that can tell you about that, and this is where you find "control". What kind of control are you talking about here? Deliberate? Accidental? Algorithmic? Censoring?

stuckkeys 5y ago

I think he meant “news” are shared via those social platforms. I get his point of view.

jollybean 5y ago

? 'What We Think' is not a function of what is writ or recorded, rather where the lens is focused. Google is the 'camera'. They can ostensibly focus it anywhere with predictable results. If I wanted power, I'd rather be Google than the NYT.

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

To be fair, the word used was "control". The HN title is, once again, distorting the content of the submission. The author's discussion is focused on media consolidation and the slow death of local news, not Big Tech's control over what people consume. (Though she does cite Big Tech's practice of censoring independent news sources.)

_aavaa_ 5y ago
I don’t think distorting is the right term as the HN title is the subtitle for the article.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
  Yes, but without the title preceding it, the statement loses its context. It baffles me when people want to override authors on titles. Sure, sometimes it might make sense to do so, but most of the time the author is the person in the best position to present and explain what she has written.
  - _aavaa_ 5y ago
    "The Monopoly On Your Mind, Part 1: Consolidation Craze & Illusion of Choice" I don't see what context this adds.
    - 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
      I do. If this was the HN title I would not necessarily think about Big Tech. Then when I began reading the blog post I would quickly see it is about media consolidation and the decline of local news, not about Big Tech intermediary (middleman) control over the delivery of media that some other entity has produced. This is only Part 1, so there may be more about Big Tech in Parts 2 and 3.
griffinkelly 5y ago
Great documentary on the decline of local news and battle against social media that aired on PBS about Storm Lake, Iowa: https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/documentaries/storm-lake/ https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/documentaries/storm-lake...

yosito 5y ago

Judging by personal experience a large portion of humanity gets their worldview from memes which are most certainly not produced by the aforementioned institutions.

jesusofnazarath 5y ago

faeriechangling 5y ago

The people who actually point their camera at things are everyday people with smartphones. The majority of "news" content I've seen taken with a camera over the last few years was not been taken by a professional journalist. The George Floyd story, maybe the story of the decade revolved around footage taken with a smartphone camera.

edmcnulty101 5y ago
It was made huge by those 6 corporations. Not one person with a camera and a YouTube channel.
t0bia_s 5y ago
Irony of fate is that our history is documented on vertical videos. For me it is proof that it is only about consumerism, quantity and emotions.
sofixa 5y ago
> The George Floyd story, maybe the story of the decade Pandemic with millions of dead, war in Ukraine, huge scale corruption ( Pandora papers), COP26, an attempted coup in a supposedly liberal democracy to name just a few things from this decade, and a racially motivated murder by a policeman in the US is your pick for "the story of the decade" 2 years in? Sorry to burst your bubble but the vast majority of the planet doesn't care that much (beyond initial compassion) about racial problems in the US.
- faeriechangling 5y ago
  Ukraine war is a bigger story, just slipped my mind. The Floyd story is bigger than a murder though, at least 19 people died in the ensuing protests, over 10 thousand were arrested, and there was a few billion in property damage.

jononor 5y ago

With news services like Reuters, Associated Press etc many stories published by a newspaper is also just aggregation/curation/presentation.