Mark Zuckerberg Doesn’t Understand Journalism
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Of course I can't blame them, because the industry's economic reality is that a certain number of articles must be published every day, and opinions are just much more plentiful and easier to source than breaking news.
Yet the broader reality is that Facebook has no obligation to society at large to deliver these opinion pieces to the masses. In fact by doing so, Facebook (and the internet more broadly) contributes to social unrest and polarization by constantly feeding people opinions that reinforce their own.
Facebook should be reducing the visibility of such content on its network.
Certainly high quality opinions exist, and they do have value. And intellectual content usually holds at least some kernel if opinion. But the problem is the pile-on, the crowd-fury, the group-think that always seems to accompany and eventually overpower those few reasoned opinions that exist.
The root problem is the avalanche of opinions that assaults our rationality whenever anything happens in the world. We need to slow things down to reduce the group-think, to give people room to breathe and the reasoned opinions to be heard and not shouted down.
Hence my belief that Facebook should reduce its bandwidth for opinion ("news").
It's true that there are lots of low-quality opinions too, but there is more than enough high-quality opinionated content to fill your day reading. There's no reason to read "breaking news". If something's important, a weekly publication will soon enough have something thoughtful to say about it.
Yea, they get most of their money from ads and also subscriptions so they need to produce a great volume of content to get the most return, but that also sets the bar very low if that's now acceptable "journalism". Compared to what used to be written in newspapers, the average content we are getting now is (subjectively) much worse overall. Rather than numerous well-written text articles with a few ads and one opinion section, most online news websites look like the reverse of that nowadays.
But you know what you're getting into with these pieces -- they largely exist as an outlet for opinion pieces. What I have a problem with are outlets like the NYTimes which blur the line between opinion and news.
I don't have a horse in this race, since I quit Facebook, but I'd rather see Facebook do its unavoidable filtering in a way that is aware of relationships but blind to content; you see more posts from individuals and groups that you give evidence of caring about, without regard for what they say.
Indeed, FB should probably tread lightly in the gray area. But don't let the existence of a gray area confound attempts to deal with the giant, growing, cancerous, black mass.
This content is part of the worst filter bubble of all time. You and I don't see it, because this content is not merely targeted towards the "highly suggestible" demographic, but carefully targeted away from the "might publicly object or be able to do something to stop it" demographic, which most HN readers are in. That anti-targeting allows showing much more scurrilous content than could ever be shown on TV.
Something like "ABCnews.com.co" is A) impersonating ABC and B) publishing objectively-false stories. If Facebook wants to put a warning next to it, or drop its share priority, or only accept shares with comments attached, I don't give a damn. That's not an entry into a partisan fight, it's the news equivalent of flagging a spam link.
I have lots of Facebook friends who sometimes share dubious or ill-sourced stories, and I wish they wouldn't. But I have a few Facebook friends in a very different group, who post whole-cloth inventions at the level of the dumbest conspiracies, or take Onion and Duffleblog articles as real news. It's a fundamentally different phenomenon.
I think until recently the algorithm making the decision has had a peculiar bias. It's had a bias for "engagement" and the most engaging content is often the most outrageous / incendiary / clickbaity.
So if Facebook doesn't "choose what's good for you", a default decision was already made: they'll show you what's engaging. But I think it's important to appreciate that default is still biased. It's just biased in a strange way that could have negative political consequences.
This is the same sort of "say it enough and it becomes true" crap that Zuckerberg is peddling.
How in the world would having Facebook pick which publishers to pay end up with better news? They've going to pay the ones that people already want to see and show it to those same people. But now those publishers are further incentivized to cater to that crowd, if that's even possible.
There's no way that Facebook ends up being an actual source of truth for news.
People want to point to FB and say "Hey, they're spreading the wrong news!" But it's other people who are actually pushing the buttons to spread that news, not Facebook.
It wouldn't. It's just the solution that most closely models their historical distribution models which their entire business is built around (and has been for so long, they know no other way to do it).
There was a time when people who had passion to bring knowledge before the world worked to achieve that and invented "journalism". That rare breed of people exists today and actually flourishes because of Youtube, Google and Facebook.
There is another lot who called themselves "journalists" and worked hard to get the privileges associated with it without actually having passion for bringing knowledge to people. Privileges => access to corridors of power, swinging political opinion, pimping for political patrons or simply making money.
Gawker is a good example. They tried to bully someone and got bullied into extinction themselves.
When I speak to journalists at NYT or Time, I realise that they have developed this sense of entitlement where they think they are doing great job where as independent bloggers and youtubers are shit because they dont have journalistic credentials.
It is actually opposite. Big media houses have failed us but the independent bloggers are the ones leading the torch helped by Google, Facebook etc.
There is another lot who called themselves "journalists" and worked hard to get the privileges associated with it without actually having passion for bringing knowledge to people. Privileges => access to corridors of power, swinging political opinion, pimping for political patrons or simply making money.
is silly and poorly thought out. The number of journalists who have any proximity to "corridors of power" or political patrons or any sort of power is so obviously, vanishingly small that it's not representative of the profession as a whole. And you might not think journalists are good enough at bringing knowledge to people, but if you think they don't have a passion for it, you just haven't known a lot of journalists.
Skin in the Game will be the first Taleb book I haven't read, but he's turned into such a tedious, self-important bore.
This is a picky comment, but I think it's important to distinguish "proximity to power" from "holding power". There are a lot of journalists with proximity to power, some of them doing a serious disservice to the public because of that proximity. A false story like Iraqi yellowcake uranium was peddled by high-profile, respectable journalists because they had and relied on proximity to power. But it didn't give them power, it just made them a mouthpiece.
Which doesn't make the preceding commenter right, that's still wildly off-base. I just wanted to note that the journalists close to power rarely have it, and the journalists with real power are rarer and tend to lack proximity to political power. They do exist - Murrow and Woodward for good, Hearst for ill - but most of them only have it for a moment.
(And yes, Skin in the Game is unbearable. Reading the pre-release excerpts felt like hiking through egomaniacal mud, and I'm not likely to try the whole book.)
One thing that's ironic is that Nassim Taleb doesn't appear to understand that the kind of reporters who seek out Nassim Taleb aren't representative of the entire profession.
Yes, you are right that may be top 1% of journalists actually get to speak to an elected Senator on regular basis but these top 1% have an army of junior folks who would bend over backwards for a minor favour from their bosses.
An political patrons are not always the politicians but also the lobbyists such as Planned Parenthood, NRA, Monsanto, NAACP, Teachers Union, Climate Change Supporters, Climate Change Skeptics and so on.
> you just haven't known a lot of journalists.
Are you saying the vast majority of journalists currently employed have more soul in the game than the independent bloggers and youtube channel owners who take one niche issue focus just on that ?
Are you telling me that working with some big name in media actually makes you better than people are just committed out of their passion ?
I think maybe Taleb's critique is perhaps meant to be aimed at the sort of elite tier of celebrity journalists, who are pretty easy to dislike. I tend to think the critique is way too heavy-handed, though. There's a great deal of crap being produced today but, if we're candid about it, in terms of pure volume there's more high-quality reporting today than there has ever been. People are fatigued by the effort of filtering out the garbage but it's intellectually lazy to dismiss the whole thing.
There are some wonderful journalist as well but they are mostly the exceptions.
Funded by the ad revenue from clickbait, quizzes, memes, and listicles, it was actually able to afford to pay for the long-form content that you used to expect only from, say, National Geographic or the Atlantic.
Yet this is the propaganda tool de jour. The perception of public sentiment is very important in shaping peoples opinions, irrespective of the facts. A fact today might be interpreted in some way, the same fact in two years might be interpreted in a completely different manner. Perception is even more important than facts, because facts are actually just claims by authority figures. If you spread a certain sentiment that a certain authority figure is untrustworthy (or vice versa) you can "amend facts" in the minds of the electorate.
I don't use Facebook, I don't have a Facebook account, and I never have had one. Why do they want me to whitelist Facebook trackers? No.
Last time I'll ever attempt to read The Atlantic. Fk them. If the news isn't covered by NYT or the Post (the only newspapers I pay for) then it isn't worth knowing about, I guess.
Journalism requires reporters, fact checkers and editors united by a culture that cares about accuracy and truth.
Facebook is the polar opposite of this. People sharing shit on Facebook is a nutrient-rich environment for both ignoramuses and bad actors pushing agitprop.
Facebook can't clean up their cesspool of disinformation by spreading algorithmic special sauce on top of it.
Eliminating 80% would improve the world's psyche considerably.
What could Facebook do to improve news quality without censorship? It could just go back to what it already did with trending stories, before they fired their entire human-review team and then immediately started promoting objectively-false claims. It could even keep the algorithmic choices, and just pay for one media-savvy person per shift to skim the headlines and delete anything blatantly stupid.
I find their promises of "we promise to only feed you real news" dishonest. Isn't the whole premise behind news that it's information aggregated and broken down by a person. That makes it inherently biased no matter how hard a person tries to keep bias out of it.... it's just part of it. So under what metrics will they determine that information isn't biased? It just doesn't make sense to me.
It feels like a catch 22. Facebook makes a lot of money by posting ads for news and funneling traffic to other sites. But users leave when their feeds are garbage or they feel like Facebook isn't doing anything to protect them. Lets just tell both sides we will solve the problem, but never actually explain how we will do that.
Facebook will never pay for content. And you can’t really help but laugh at all the papers who bent over backwards to make sure they had a “social media precense” all they did was move their communities to Facebook for free and now they can’t cut the ties of providing free content to favebook because that would cut the ties to their readers.
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If this is what journalism is, I’m glad someone out there is trying something different, not saying FB’s version is necessarily better.
Is the purpose of news and journalism to establish what happened?
Or why it happened?
Or what's likely to happen next because it happened?
Or what's important to pay attention to in the first place?
This seems to be the central dispute. Facebook promotes the opinions of friends and family over articles on nytimes.com. I don't think nytimes would care so much but for the fact that so many people are in fact paying more attention to the opinions of friends and family. More than just the lost advertising revenue, this is an existential issue for nytimes and similar content creators.
Zuckerberg seems to realize this, given the comment about public funding, but that is just an unrealistic throwaway line in the current moment. I don't much like the idea that you can make billions by destroying the support for a pillar of civilization and then say that's not your problem to solve.
Not a lot of "opinion" fits in there, that I can see. Though of course it's nearly impossible for humans, even journalists, to be opinion-free.
Oh, bullshit. Google and Facebook didn't kill journalism, "journalism" decided not to complete and thought people would keep paying similar ad rates for something objectively worse.
And whining about how Facebook doesn't pay to license journalist content? In my "trending" section I can click to see a one sentence summary and then click through to the news site. It's not on facebook, except for that one sentence (which might be written by a user? Not clear to me) and a link. What would they pay for?
1. Establish a dominant arbiter of fact. 2. Place as it’s head a decidedly odd person with some very curious ideas. 3. Ensure via voting rules that he is accountable to no-one. 4. Allow it a natural monopoly from which it can extract massive rents. 5. Give it surveillance powers unparalleled in human existence.
Idi Amin, Gaddafi, Chairman Mao, would have and did kill for this type of power.
Instead we have “Zuck”. What a schmuck.
Grandiose phrases like "unparalleled in human existence" similarly lower signal-noise ratio, because they turn up the volume without adding information.
The "schmuck" thing is name-calling, which the site guidelines ask you not to do. Ditto for the "decidedly odd person" swipe, which is a personal attack. We can argue about whether "Zuck" deserves better, but the community certainly does.
Beyond all that, what is the content of the post? You haven't presented any argument about "how to run a country". It's really just rhetoric. I agree with you—most of us do, I'm sure—that the things you listed can have negative consequences in the political sphere. But what those actually are are hard to pin down, and your comment hasn't said anything thoughtful about them.
When the signal is obfuscated by a massive PR and lobbying exercise, then sometimes cutting through that noise to call a spade a spade - or in this case a Zuck a schmuck, is indeed the correct response. I hope this is not a flamewar, but instead see it as my pointing out that metaphor and comparison are rhetorical devices to draw attention to wider truths, and I think that’s fair.