Tag: fake news

Google Down-Ranks Real News

Photo by enriscapes

As alluded to in yesterday’s post, the 2016 shock to what we might politely call political orthodoxy provided a boost to mainstream news subscriptions. “The [New York Times] added 276,000 net digital-only subscriptions in the final three months of 2016, the best showing since it implemented its paywall in 2011. In the weeks immediately following Mr. Trump’s election in November, subscriptions increased tenfold compared with the previous year,” wrote Shannon Bond for Financial Times in February.  Similar spikes occurred at The Washington Post and other traditional news sources. So, if nothing else, the bizarre theater of obfuscation and Twitter rants coming out of the new administration seemed at least to rekindle millions of Americans’ desire for credible reportage.

But get this…

Gerry Smith for Bloomberg reports that when The Wall Street Journal blocked Google users from reading its articles for free, its subscription business “soared” only to see this gain countered by a 44% drop in traffic from Google search.  It turns out, according to Smith, that Google’s algorithm prioritizes free content over paid content.  Assuming this is true, there’s a whole lot wrong with it, beginning with the fact that this belies Google’s boastful raison d’etre to “organize the world’s information” and deliver search results based on quality and relevance.

If the algorithm looks for free content first, this suggests that fake news and other junk content will be consistently prioritized over the WSJ, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Daily Beast, and so on. Not only does Google’s policy in this case stifle these organizations’ flexibility to choose their own strategies for financial survival, but for the general public, it exacerbates the already toxic brew of bad information that is, at this point, literally threatening democracy itself.  And for what?

Money of course.  Google makes money by serving ads to content that users can more readily access without going through paywalls.  Consequently, ConspiracyIdiots.com makes it into the top results instead of, y’know, news—at least according to what Bloomberg is reporting. “The Journal’s experience could have implications across the news industry, where publishers are relying more on convincing readers to pay for their articles because tech giants like Google and Facebook are vacuuming up the lion’s share of online advertising,” writes Smith.

I’ve gone so far as to assert that we’ve actually lost the “information revolution.” The promise of a more enlightened society through digital technology has hardly been fulfilled, but we do have some very funny memes to stick on the fridge of history.  Given the extent to which the current narrative has been hijacked by a strange confluence of bored trolls and professional data manipulators, a sane person can be forgiven for deciding that it’s about time to unplug.  A recent report by the Data & Society Research Institute on the influence of—I guess we can call it “troll culture”—on even the mainstream media says the following:

“Mass media has greatly profited off the appeal of conspiracy theories despite their potential for harm. Network news channels feature ‘documentaries’ investigating theories without fully refuting them. In 2011, when Donald Trump began promoting the “Birther” conspiracy theory, claiming President Obama was born outside of the United States, mainstream news outlets like CNN and Fox News covered these claims extensively. Out of this environment, an entire industry of conspiracy and fringe theory has emerged.”

The report delves into the intricate network of internet subcultures described as “an amalgam of conspiracy theorists, techno-libertarians, white nationalists, Men’s Rights advocates, trolls, anti-feminists, anti-immigration activists, and bored young people,” who are directly influencing the narrative that many citizens around the world think of as the truth.  And this is bad enough.  “Google says its ‘first click free’ policy is good for both consumers and publishers. People want to get the news quickly and don’t want to immediately encounter a paywall,” writes Smith.

Sound familiar?  What’s good for Google is invariably “good for consumers.” And consumers invariably buy the pitch for a while.  Free?  Yeah, free sounds good.  Until it turns out that free actually a cost. Sometimes a very dire cost—like millions of voters who would sooner believe in alien abduction than climate science. And the point of the above quote about television news creating entertainment out of nonsense is that sensationalism will be the only thing left, if business models no longer support investigation, travel, research, fact checking, and other expensive human labor required to deliver quality journalism.  Add to all this that Google search will apparently down-rank legitimate news because it isn’t free?  Damn.

Disruption achieved.  What now?

Returning to the generalization that the internet is the “best thing ever to happen to democracy,” I have to ask this:  if the proof of the pudding is in the eating, how do we like the soufflé so far?  Admittedly, the unprecedented scope of the Women’s March on January 21 would not have been possible without social media; but at the same time, I very much doubt that a candidate in the style of Donald Trump could have become president without social media, so I guess we’re going to have to live with that dichotomy.

Setting aside Trump’s policy agenda—to the extent that it is coherent—what I believe he represents above all is a vote of no confidence in the American system itself.  And to be honest, I believe Bernie Sanders’s campaign represented this for many people as well–albeit in a very different manner.  But what these two radically divergent populists had in common was a message that the middle class is getting hammered because the system has failed.  It’s why the Sanders-to-Trump voter is not the contradiction it might seem; but I do find it at least worth pondering that the election of 2016 was very much A Tale of Two Angry Old Men.  Not that I discount Hillary Clinton by any means, but it seems as though the venn diagram that combines many swing votes in the electorate who would never vote for Hillary with those who reluctantly voted for Hillary shared that common complaint that the establishment itself is the problem.

And now that we are watching Trump’s approach to “shaking up Washington” play out in an exhausting whirlwind of political heterodoxy, I can’t help but think about that youthful and ebullient mantra of Silicon Valley that preaches Disrupt Everything. Citizens across the political spectrum, fed up with the status quo on a wide range of social, political, and economic issues, either actively or passively endorsed this disrupt zeitgeist. Remember the old Facebook motto Move fast and break things that was echoed by the VCs and creators of tech startups?  Could that not also serve as the headline for Trump’s first weeks in the White House?

The cacophony of political theater and real policy proposals of the new administration has certainly been breathtaking, but it is also familiar territory to those of us who spend time scrutinizing the PR and policy aims of the internet industry. The disestablishment playbook of Bannon seems to share, one might say, substantial similarity with the disestablishment playbook of Google when that company opposes legal regimes like copyright law, privacy restrictions, anti-trust regulation, or even the notion of statehood itself.

Like the sledgehammer Trump wants to take to all regulation in order to supposedly “get business flowing again,” Google & Friends have repeated almost the same message to sell the idea that legal regimes like copyright are anachronisms standing in the way of innovation. The sleight of hand works well because the goal is vague.  That word innovation is no more clearly defined than the word great in Trump’s campaign slogan. But the spirit of disruption insists that we not discuss the nagging details about where we might be headed. It says that we must simply break things right away and have faith that benefits are sure to follow.

And I do literally mean faith.  Because an enthusiasm for mass disruption seems to come from a deep well of magical thinking. Whether this means an overtly theocratic agenda a la Bannon or an overtly technocratic one a la Google, both visions seem to share this one underlying message:  that many foundations of the American Republic (i.e. all things mainstream) are standing in the way of a bright future. It feels as though we are locking in a dismal choice between the catastrophe of a new, theocratic global order or the uncertainty of a quasi-democratic, technological, “leisure” society. Or perhaps some bizarre, dystopian version of the two.  Meanwhile, the AI technologists continue their race to bring about the singularity with the same determinist zeal that Steve Bannon exhibits about the prospect of a war with China. Are we truly that eager for self-annihilation? Again?  No wonder a reported 50% of these same technologists have invested millions on their survivalist backup plans.

Blind faith in information technology to preserve democratic principles is just that:  blind.  As I suggested in an older post, because social media has divvied us up according to our brand of outrage, it is helping to hollow out the political center, leaving a vacuum for autocrats (or technocrats?) to fill. It was just a few years ago, when the Snowden story broke, and everyone became all leak-happy, that I criticized my progressive friends for looking in every direction for conspiracies and for putting too much faith in the illusion of transparency afforded by digital technologies.

We forget at our peril how fragile the American deal really is—that it is nothing more than an idea we mutually agree not to destroy, no matter how much we disagree on specific issues.  As I wrote in response to this 360-degree conspiracy view, if we completely lose faith in all functions of government, it means we’ve lost faith in each other, which is the beginning of the end.

Michael Idov, writing for New York Magazine, provides a glimpse into his experiences living and working in Russia as a cautionary tale about what happens when that very fragile agreement does not exist—when trust itself is obliterated. In a description that reminds me of at least cybernetic America over the last several years, Idov writes:

“Russian life, I soon found out, was marked less by fear than by cynicism: the all-pervasive idea that no institution is to be trusted, because no institution is bigger than the avarice of the person in charge. This cynicism, coupled with endless conspiracy theories about everything, was at its core defensive (it’s hard to be disappointed if you expect the worst). But it amounted to defeatism.”

And that’s the underlying message being delivered 140 characters at a time from the Oval Office today—that not one institution can be trusted over the word of a single individual. It is a defeatist and dangerous message, but not one that was written by Donald Trump so much as it was exploited by him. We wrote the narrative ourselves. Feeling let down by the system, we went looking for saviors instead of leaders.

The detrimental effect of social media, feeding the illusion that this technology fosters real transparency, cannot be overstated. The very significant phenomenon that some citizens sincerely believe that a presidential tweet is more honest and informative than the investigative work of a veteran journalist may seem mind-boggling, but it was an inevitable result of disrupting everything. And it is certainly not only Trump’s supporters who’ve bought into this idea that we can all be our own news sources now because the “mainstream” cannot be trusted. To the contrary, every day I see some friend on Facebook shake a head at the White House calling a verifiable fact “fake news,” but in the next instant, share some misleading headline from a questionable source.

We usually talk about the United States in terms of strength and rarely in terms of its fragility.  If that sounds “weak” to some, a reading of the Framers’ own words will show that they understood exactly how fragile the Republic is—that the moment it ceases to be a statesman’s debate about common purpose, we’re toast. But honest debate cannot occur when we have to spend so much time disputing or proving the facts themselves. Twenty years ago, we argued about what to do next, but not nearly so much about what had already happened.

As a general analysis, it is extremely hard to believe that we were not better off with a little less “information” and a little less “transparency.”  Because there is simply no denying the evidence that millions of us—right, left, and center—are operating with our own sets of facts and “alternative facts.” At the same time, it is also questionable whether or not any bi-partisan cooperation could ever happen under the gaze of constant public scrutiny.

It’s a little late now, of course. With the Executive adopting an authoritarian tone, and a party-line vote like we saw in the confirmation of a patently unqualified Secretary of Education, we’ve clearly crossed some threshold in the realm of sincere debate that is neither liberal nor conservative.  But this is what comes from an underlying loss of faith in the system itself and the chaos of the tech-enabled “direct democracy” that is, in many ways, an antidote to corruption but which is also highly vulnerable to corruption itself.

So, mission accomplished. We’re disrupted. “Big League.”  What’s next?

Photo by michaklootwijk

A Free Press Needs to Be Expensive

067217744-meet-press
Photo by stocksnapper

As a follow-up to my last post, I see that the Electronic Frontier Foundation has (not surprisingly) also accused the News Media Alliance (NMA) of petitioning the incoming administration to “weaken fair use doctrine” and, by extension, threaten press freedom itself.  Granted, in contrast to Mike Masnick’s ad hominem style on Techdirt, when EFF obfuscates, they usually write a more sober, mature-sounding article, but readers should not be mesmerized by the parlor trick.  Because they’re still not telling the whole truth.

At a time when Americans are suddenly realizing that professional journalism may be more important—and more under siege—than ever, both citizens and advocacy groups like EFF should remember that good journalism is expensive.  If we don’t want news to devolve entirely to the glib gotchas of Twitter, then somebody has to invest in the reporters, researchers, editors, etc. who develop the skills and experience to cover stories with integrity.  In order to make those investments possible, to say nothing of profitable, publishers have to retain the right to protect and exploit the products of this labor through distribution models of their choosing.  So, while fair use doctrine is unequivocally necessary for journalism, this reality is not in conflict with the need for news publishers to protect their copyright interests at the same time.

Frankly, in light of the fact that the anti-copyright policies advocated by EFF and similar organizations have played a substantial role in creating information havoc, like the fake news problem, I think when it comes to the press, these groups ought to be rubbing gravel in their hair—or at least sent to their rooms to think about what they’ve done. Years of blind—and greedy—advocacy of anything goes under the ambit of the First Amendment is a major reason why real journalists have to compete with bogus ones,  and why news organizations continue to have their investments threatened by various platforms and tech interests that appropriate their work.

In the EFF’s version of accusing the NMA of trying to weaken the fair use doctrine, they  set up a straw man and then point to a bunch of unrelated “evidence” to support the accusation.  As stated in my last post, the NMA’s white paper does not seek any revision to the fair use principle, but it does call into question the relatively recent, broadening interpretation of the “transformative” standard within fair use analyses.  The EFF article might give readers the impression that this standard is a well-grounded and longstanding legal principle, but that simply isn’t the case.

If we bracket the “transformative” standard between the first major application in Campbell (1994) and the most high-profile, current case, Google Books (2016), we see that we’re dealing with two very different meanings of the word “transformative.” ”Transformativeness” in Campbell entails a use to create a new expression while “transformativeness” in Google Books entails a use to create a new service that is not an expression. While both uses can be valuable, and even described colloquially as “transformative,” it is misleading to suggest that the case law in which this standard has been applied is consistent, given the divergent meanings of the term.

It is the application of the latter standard that is of concern to many rights holders, including news publishers. This is because the latter interpretation substantially alters the original intent of fair use, which is to favor the First Amendment, to a more generalized standard of “creating some new thing,” which may not be a form of expression at all. It is also worth noting that most uses by journalists have always been protected by fair use principles that existed prior to the introduction of the “transformative” standard by Pierre Leval in his 1990 Harvard Law Review paper.

The truly insidious part of this story is that the EFF has been directly responsible for morphing fair use doctrine in both the courts and the court of public opinion.  With its decade-long boondoggle in Lenz v UMG, and its chronic implication that fair use is the antithesis of copyright (rather than an important component of copyright), the EFF fails to recognize that its advocacy in this regard can be more harmful to free expression and a free press than the concerns it claims to address.  While the organization defends the role of aggregators and other platforms that make uses of works they did not author, the EFF ignores some of the very negative results of this policy, which have become starkly manifest in recent weeks.

For instance, the violent assaults on a Washington, DC pizzeria as the consequence of fake news is not exclusively a story about criminal instigators and idiot readers. It is symptomatic of a disease caused when serious journalism is given equal footing with the ravings of every crackpot or miscreant with a keyboard.  This trend has been toxic for the press, and it is naive to think that defending every use and every expression on First Amendment grounds has not been an aggravating factor in this case.

In some instances, news aggregators do not merely provide access to news, but they often strip news of context or substance by repackaging segments in a manner that may be good for driving traffic but do disservice to the goals of journalism.   Press freedom is utterly meaningless unless we support a professional press, and the News Media Alliance is correct to observe that relatively recent distortions of the fair use principle have played a role in threatening that professionalism.