Can Google fix the news industry it helped break?
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Which is the real issue. As long as we don't hold people with a public voice accountable for what they say, or regulate the platforms which allow those voices to reach billions, then we're going to be in trouble. Making Google or Facebook share some of what they earn with the news industry isn't going to change that.
And why wouldn't we hold instagram influencers to the same editorial standards that we did national news papers, when those influencers have more reach? Free speech simply doesn't work without responsibility, and neither does democracy.
It's completely insane that we now live in a world where we have to take science deniers seriously, and it's frankly going to ruin us. Because people aren't only spreading nonsense on social media to get rich, or because they like the attention, there are anti-democratic governments who are using our own unregulated platforms against us, in coordinated attempts to destroy western civilization.
So if you want to save the news industry, don't just make Google, Facebook and every other social media platform that hides behind their own users, pay up, make them responsible for the content that they allow onto their platforms exactly like we made the news industry responsible for what they print.
I think there's a good case that it was broken by Facebook and Google. Specifically them taking away all the ad revenue that used to go to newspapers. That's what led to traditional media outlets going out of business and/or turning to clickbait to make money.
I'm not sure how we're still allowing these giant tech-companies to more or less regulate themselves in the EU. I mean, which public mandate do they have, to remove the elected president of one of the most powerful nations on earth?
I'm not trying to turn this political or pro or anti Trump or even pro or anti ban, by the way. But these companies removed one of the most powerful political figures in the world from the reach of millions provided by their platforms, without asking any form of democratic institution for permission to do so. That just screams for regulation in my eyes.
This might true for Facebook. But Google isn't even a media platform, it's a search engine. It's just that search adverts happen to work better than newspaper adverts because their more targeted to people they're relevant too.
If a Danish news paper profiled their advertising specifically for me because they happened to know how much money I spend on Warhammer figures, they would be breaking our laws.
Even with the GDPR, Google can do the same thing legally.
And google goes beyond just advertising doesn't it? If I google air humidity in my town, because I want to spray prime Warhammer figures, google selects which site it shows me the information from in the google widget thing. Maybe it's not as bad as Facebook, but what happens if you search for the covid-19 vaccine and you're an anti-vaxxer? What data ends up in googles info-boxes then?
News industry sites are chock full of ads of all kinds, when most people agree they don't want to see them, and they also lead the way in tracking and abusing user data.
Maybe the wrong step happened earlier.
We also have an independant institution to make sure these are upheld. In Denmark it's called Pressenævnet, and it's members are appointed by our Supreme Court, a "guild" of the editors of the primary medias in our country, a political body for PBS services and journalist unions.
Works perfectly fine, and as far as the EU goes, I think that's the direction we need to take.
I have no idea how you would do it in the US, but I don't think that's really for us to worry about either.
But as I said, I have no idea how it would work for USA. It's honestly kind of hard for me to imagine how any US regulatory bodies work, when they replace the leadership every four years, and often without a broad cross-party agreement.
Of course one might add that there is very little questioning of the ombudsman himself, historically. If you get dragged into a case and he says your website is scammy, he's right and you're wrong. The office hasn't been drawn into politics, something that you might imagine would destroy trust in the institution. The Danish government fell on a case brought by the big Ombudsmanden once, but nobody was bringing into question the legitimacy of the office.
The question is then whether such an office would be transplantable to other countries, where things are more polarized. Perhaps one of the biggest things comparing Denmark and eg the US is that there are institutions in Denmark that people trust, whereas in the US everyone is put in a red or blue box.
I suggest you locate someone with this type of graduate education and ask them where to start if one is serious about the issues raised by this article. I can guarantee you, unless the people behind this are pure stupid manipulators, they have governance specialists already working on their behalf, and they are using $400 words to describe what they are doing.
Pretty much every corporation over 10,000 people have someone either on their staff or on the corporate board whose sole role is governance. This important area is already populated with high level experts with their own Scientology-technical-speak one must know to be taken seriously.
We're so smart, we kill ourselves.
Everything in human reality is about boundaries and responsibilities within those boundaries. As manipulators successfully fool the public into thinking otherwise, we get a completely insane information attack, filling 360 degrees of our environment. It is going to require generations to undo the damage the last 4 years have done to the United States both domestically and internationally.
But... why? That’s like saying YCombinator should pay every website for the content being discussed on HackerNews.
> Given that the search giant can account for more than a quarter of their traffic ...
Sounds more like news organizations should be paying Goog/FB for referring users.
I truly believe that this is just further proof that News Media are unwilling to innovate and would rather focus on lobbying and regulations to maintain their status quo.
or not if you accept that there's a difference between a machine taking everything in an republishing it, and people selectively finding things from all times and posting them with most of the value being provided by the extra value of the comments.
It's obvious that HN adds a lot of value whereas Google does not.
They do not prevent people from using the website’s own search; it’s just that almost no one does so because a general purpose search engine is more useful to them.
The first is that it perpetuates the clickbait bs attention grabbing that is the bane of actual information flow. This is the opposite of what we want if newspapers are to fulfil their hoped for role in public discourse (to inform). But most of these models reward it.
The second is the idea that Google is "stealing" news. One of the core issues with news is that you cannot copywrite it. When Greenwald broke the Snowden revelations, it was the result of months of hard work and investment by him, the Guardian and the Washington Post. They took significant risks, both commercially and physically. They worked through 1000s of documents, checked and double checked, talked to other sources and prepared expensive legal teams. Then hours later ever other paper on earth started printing the same news for free and selling it. How is that any different to Google etc putting ads against search.
I don't know what the right model is for newspapers. But so far the only commercially viable one has been to rip off other people's actual investigatuve journalism, water it down by pandering to readers' prejudices and then sell political influence based on being able to sway readers votes.
These changes will at best just continue and entrench that model. We need a whole new playing field.
Plus as a bonus, when x% of your revenue comes from Google etc, it's suddenly a lot harder to criticise Google etc. I suspect, cynically, that's the real aim here: open your pocket book and we'll put down our pens (not the first time that's happened...).
I actually like that. A extra 10£/$/€ a month isn't that much and would be quite a lot for news organisations.
The issue is how to split the money. I'd want to only support investigative journalism, but that's a hard thing to define or measure...
A monolithic "news paper" covering different areas like sports, science, politics, what's on TV today, weather and so on is not optimal in the 21:st century because distribution is easier.
I'd then have subscriptions to services specializing in different kinds of content depending on interest. Because these services do not compete with free, they could spend more time on the articles and less time on hyperbole, polarization and anger - three tools that are great for growth and engagement, but detrimental to society.
People who polarize are seen and heard a lot: they use free news articles on social media to spread their perspective to as many as possible, triggering a counter reaction on the other direction, also influencing the journalists because they get clicks.
How wonderful it would be if none of that was free so people had to pay to read whatever has been spread. The blast radius would be limited.
My gut feeling is that 80% of the world are not interested in using news instrumentally to force political views on others. They may get caught up into it, but wouldn't if they weren't continously confronted with it.
It's the age old rule that 95% on internet communities lurk, and 5% post content. The 5% are more insane than average. :-)
Today in 2021 people are USED to seeing free news on social media. But that's just the current status quo. Imagine a society where people did not see or share stuff like that, as seldom as people share music or tv-shows or other kinds of content? There is nothing special with "news". It just happened to be the thing that's free and constructed to make people emotional and angry.
If there were only subscription services not competing with free, I think people would buy something that's as neutral and unbiased as possible.
This is the problem we are seeing. People get stuck in echo chambers and, for some, it apparently radicalizes them.
However, I think this idea exists already. The Financial Times, for example.
My wife and I also subscribe to streaming video entertainment, which is much more expensive, but she gets good value from it.
Off topic, but as Google gets some justifiable criticism here on HN, I am very happy with their paid services. I pay for Pro Colab, YouTube Music, GCP, and occasionally buy books and movies.
I detest the “free” models for content. I like Twitter because I follow some awesome tech people, but I wish I could pay a monthly fee and not see the advertising. Why they don’t offer that option seems a little crazy to me.
Curious, what do you use to measure the value of entertainment?
I recall an article from a while ago that paywalls helped the rise of conspiracy theories, since it was the only free news available while quality news sources put themselves behind paywalls. It does seem we're in for a reckoning, and I don't know what the answer is - it seems the way we're headed, those who can afford it get to pay for quality news and everyone else gets free propaganda.
There are two ways to help this status quo in my mind. Get red of the ability to repost/retweet/etc. People are lazy and won't make their own post but a click of the button is trivial and spreads nonsense. Also, we need to start a VAT on ad revenue. If we want other models, like NPR style or Patreon style, then we need to made ads less profitable.
Really reminds me of my old (socialist) government who kept big failing companies on a life support due to so-called "national interest". They all horribly failed right after transition because their products were completely obsolete and unable to function on a free market.
I think free (as in speech) high quality journalism has a special place in democratic countries, which needs to be protected and funded. I don’t think the same applies to the automotive industry.
I don’t disagree that old media companies have failed to innovate and modernise. But equally the impact of the internet and entities like Google and Facebook on news is undeniable. We’ve lost huge amounts of investigative journalism, both local and national. And replaced it with click bait memes that serve to drive uncritical opinions, making it easier for leaders to act with indiscretion, and get away with it.