Unlike newspaper front pages and magazine covers? (FWIW I agree that FB/Twitter should take responsibility, but I also think journalists should reflect on their role as well. After all, it's their headlines being ranked...)
But newspapers are liable for the content they publish, and that keeps misinformation somewhat in check.
If Twitter and Facebook etc were held to publisher standards they couldn’t exist in any form like they do today. I kind of think that would be a good thing.
>In particular, content from sources rated as far-right by independent news rating services consistently received the highest engagement per follower of any partisan group.
It doesn't matter if something is written down as being against the law/regulations/whatever if the punishment for breaking that law/regulation is toothless, seldom applied, or so expensive to get proceedings started that 90% of the population is priced-out of pursuing their case from the start.
"Just sue them if they write something incorrect/defamatory/etc" is not really a realistic option for the majority of people, not a guarantee of anything happening or reforming, and generally the damage has already been caused. No one really cares about a retraction issued a few months after a story is released, we've all moved on to the next outrage-inducing story.
The MSM may steer clear of the obvious falsehoods like vaportrails/5g mind control, but the misinformation they do provide is extra dangerous, especially when it's a joint effort with the government.
This gets brought up absolutely every single time, and I would love someone to link to the original primary historical sources. Their archive is all on the internet; could some committed person find what they actually said? Did they confirm it themselves, or did they just report what government spokespeople said?
It's always the same: ignore the part you don't like, amplify facts that will suit your needs, then spin your own narrative on top.
https://nymag.com/nymetro/news/media/features/9226/
"During the winter of 2001 and throughout 2002, Miller produced a series of stunning stories about Saddam Hussein’s ambition and capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction, based largely on information provided by Chalabi and his allies—almost all of which have turned out to be stunningly inaccurate."
In short, the Pentagon found a credulous NYT reporter and hooked her up with a succession of fictitious sources, which she ate up and asked for seconds. The NYT repeatedly ran stories on page 1 that were complete fiction, and played a material part in hyping the war under false pretenses (which the paper itself, in its backhanded way, has acknowledged). NYT editors also fought internally AGAINST running any stories that were skeptical of the war or of the administration's statements about Iraq.
Guess the military-industrial complex wins over free speech again.
This slogan refers to sensational violence (car crashes, murders, earthquakes), not content that inflames readers ideologically. Maybe it's tawdry in its own way, but it does not seem nearly so polarizing to me.
Newspapers, magazines, and even TV don't measure up across all these contributing dimensions.
Tabloid Journalism is known to be sensational and easily dismissed as such because of the medium, and that people in our social circles don't often peddle anything more than the latest celebrity/sports gossip.
Social Media has allowed mis/disinformation to become more credible by both the scale of distribution for that content, and the increasing that contents trustworthiness by highlighting engagement from people in our social circles.
What if Skynet was a social media algorithm... could be a good basis for the Terminator origin story.
There is news in the newspaper and in the archives of news sites but what’s front and center is outrage bait opinion pieces from large personalities.
Social Media didn't invent "sex* sells."
*Sex being the place holder for something that is controversial.
My brother used to watch Fox News (ehh..) but I mostly avoided it just cause. Anyway I sat down to watch one day and everything had scantily clad women no matter what they were discussing. A lot of the time it was about a strip club that got permits in a city somewhere in small town usa. And the segment would basically focus on dancers (no nudity in the shots) but basically everything BUT an ad for going to said strip club, even though the words themselves was "this is ruining America" - the camera angles and everything was butts, boobs and legs.
Anyway that aside. One thing that social media has over cable news is - it's cable not everyone has it, while the internet is pretty much everywhere now.
Fox News notoriously has a preference for blondes: https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2017/feb/20/women-fox-ne...
I welcome a service that tells me which celebrities are hollow. I call it "news", give it a try.
Telling you where to buy their clothes is part of the schtick - "Paul is [an idiot], dressed in Gucci pants - $35.000 at ..."
Say a newspaper printed something. You read it. You got angry. You wrote a letter to the editor and mailed it. Maybe a week later, they printed your letter. A few days later, someone you know saw your letter and commented to you that they thought you were right.
You see something on Facebook. You got angry. You wrote something in reply (perhaps with less thought than the letter to the editor, because it wasn't a once-every-few-years event). Five minutes later, likes comments start pouring in. Not just one person tells you they think you were right; ten people do. And they tell you in the next few minutes and hours, not days later. And they comment on each others' comments about your post.
You get massively more positive reinforcement for your outrage now than you did with newspapers. The outrage gets reinforced, socially ratified. You get praised for it.
It's not just that Facebook hands you more things to be outraged about (not all of them true). It's that the outrage takes much deeper hold in you, because it's reinforced so much.
The counter story is getting very little press right now, allowing her blatant lies to be spread without any scrutiny. Inside Edition interviewed her sister and her sister brought proof she was lying:
She said: ‘I don’t know how she can say I don’t know her and she was an only child. We’ve got photographs over a lifespan of us together. So how can she not know me?’ The US broadcaster showed four images of Meghan and Samantha together during the clip. Two were from when the duchess was a baby, another from when she was a small child and the last and most recent from Samantha’s graduation, 13 years ago in 2008.
Samantha also disputed Meghan’s claim that she only changed her surname back to Markle after the royal struck up a romance with Harry in 2016. ‘She changed her last name back to Markle… only when I started dating Harry. So I think that says enough,’ Meghan told Oprah. But Samantha hit back: ‘I was a Markle before she was.. Markle has always been my name.’ Samantha then showed Inside Edition her petition to change her name that was dated back to December 1997 and her college diploma, which says Samantha M. Markle.
This is a fairly non-political, pop culture example, but it highlights the fact lies spread so much faster than the truth, that actually finding the truth is nearly impossible. For me, there are no facts anymore, its all about the narrative now. Whoever controls the narrative, controls the "truth".
We only notice it because we've come out of an almost century long period in which the most effective broadcast mechanism was regulated by the FCC. This is an accident of engineering; the only reason why the FCC was even allowed to what is blatant government censorship is because of the scarcity of radio spectrum. This died the moment cable news networks became widespread. The only restriction on what, say, Fox News, CNN, or MSNBC can publish is their carriage agreement with the cable companies, which usually just dictates genre, not content. Social media is that but laundered across millions of users who "choose" what to share and like out of what platform algorithms recommend.
Prior to television, there was radio, which was also regulated under a similar regime. However, newspapers ruled the roost before that, and they had practically no limits on speech save for extremely weak defamation laws. They also were instrumental in spreading a lot of outright bullshit. "Yellow journalism" is an anagram of "clickbait", after all; and the press were perfectly happy to engage in exactly the same tactics we see today... for pretty much the same reasons. Selling lurid descriptions of political foes and foreign threats makes more money than level-headed explanations of the same controversies.
I'm not sure if either scenario could be described as "good". The FCC effectively engaged in a soft censorship regime through the means of spectrum scarcity. This meant that every information passed through [the five filters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model) of ownership, advertising, sourcing, flak, and (at the time) anti-Communism. On the other hand, it's clearly obvious that a good subset of any group of political ideologues is either incapable of or uninterested in making level-headed assessments about themselves. Self-critique is heresy in the eyes of someone more extreme than you are, and we live in times where the extremes might be right about at least one thing.
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2008/oct/09/radio.hitler...
It's worth it to them even if they have to go through and delete all the compelling counter-narratives.
(And in a truly captured society, they'd come and pick them up later for re-education, so you posting would really just be helping them find you.)
I read about it somewhere in an article about ZeroHedge practices, I can't quite find a link now.
EDIT: link: https://streetwiseprofessor.com/how-do-you-know-that-zero-he...
Then "social media" take a bit of this and a bit of that, and put it all next to each other.
Anyone with the slightest exposure to UK news media will have been confronted with this very recently; the Oprah interview with Harry and Meghan alleging the press campaign against them, subsequent back-and-forth, and finally Piers Morgan getting himself sacked for storming off his own TV show after being contradicted by his own weatherman.
The latter event is both pure old-media failure and an example of the kind of sheer derangement that being a participant in the culture wars can induce in people. At least he wasn't storming the government.
His factual correctness and his sincerity are two different things. Who knows what MM is, at heart, but if he has reason to see her negatively why shouldn't he lament her influence over his country?
Is there a time-limit, where you're only allowed to criticize someone for 5y, and so when it hit 6 his opinion was officially stale?
I notice you're not making this argument about MM.
> Is there a time-limit, where you're only allowed to criticize someone for 5y, and so when it hit 6 his opinion was officially stale?
I was referring to events over the past few days. I don't really want to relitigate this here with a green account, only to observe that you too have come in to play outrage and culture war.
> I notice you're not making this argument about MM.
I'm not talking about MM at all because your post was about PM. And it's not an argument, it's an observation, and it's true about everyone - that correctness and sincerity are not the same.
> I was referring to events over the past few days.
Right, but those events also have a history. What's an issue of a few days to us, watching from outside, is someone else's years-long story.
All this stupidity because we don’t have a metric for successful journalism other than engagement. “Things are good” doesn’t get clicks.