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By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions

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The real problem with Facebook; or, taking a stroll down Indian Dick Road

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On April 6, 2024

In Technology

Facebook now allows you to post a link to a story in the Kansas Reflector that was critical of Facebook. I tested it a little while ago. As I wrote the other day, I assumed it was initially blocked not because of the actual content of the story. I offered one data point — a Johnny Cash lyric I posted a few years ago that got me in trouble, apparently because it makes reference to guns and murder. Here are two more.

First, the Reflector story that got blocked is about a climate-mitigation program called Hot Times in the Heartland. Whoa! Sounds like some kinky stuff going on in the wheat fields.

Second, one of the worst stories about Facebook censorship I’ve heard involved The Mendocino Voice. I wrote about it in our book, “What Works in Community News.” It seems that the Voice had used Facebook to pass along an important announcement from the sheriff’s office about a wildfire evacuation route. It got taken down, though it was quickly restored when the Voice howled. No explanation was ever offered, but Adrian Fernandez Baumann, the Voice’s co-founder, observed that the post included a reference to Indian Dick Road.

The real problem with Facebook — and other Meta products, like Instagram and Threads — is that Mark Zuckerberg and company refuse to invest a single penny beyond what is absolutely necessary to create a better product. Everything is automated, robo-censors control our lives, and complaining is only occasionally successful.

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A nonprofit news outlet gets blocked by Facebook after publishing a critical story

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On April 4, 2024

In Technology

The Kansas Reflector, which has done some great work in exposing the illegal police raid on the Marion County Record in rural Kansas, got blocked by Facebook for what it reports was seven hours earlier today. Indeed, I got a notice from Facebook that something I’d linked to in the Reflector last August was being taken down.

Folks at the Reflector, a nonprofit that’s part of the States Newsroom network, are wondering if a story they published that was critical of Facebook had anything to do with it. Probably not. I’ve been kicking the hell out of Facebook for years without any problem. The only time I can remember ending up in Facebook purgatory was when I answered a question about the greatest single line in a song. My offending answer: “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.” Guns, death, algorithms!

The Reflector quotes a Twitter post from Meta spokesman Andy Stone, who said, “This was an error that had nothing to do with the Reflector’s recent criticism of Meta. It has since been reversed and we apologize to the Reflector and its readers for the mistake.” As of this writing, though, you still can’t share a link to the story that criticized Facebook. I tried just to see what would happen and got the following message: “Posts that look like spam according to our Community Guidelines are blocked on Facebook and can’t be edited.”

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The proposed TikTok ban: Justified? Or a bad move based on ‘weird, xenophobic fear’?

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On March 14, 2024

In Media, Technology

I’m conflicted on whether it’s a good idea for the U.S. to ban TikTok unless the Chinese government agrees to sell it. On the one hand, there are important First Amendment principles at stake. On the other, it doesn’t strike me that we’re required to allow China to direct propaganda at American users lest we somehow fall short in our dedication to freedom of expression.

That said, Mike Masnick of TechDirt has weighed in with a hot-blooded commentary arguing that banning TikTok would be a grotesquely wrong move. Here’s the heart of it:

The US has dealt with foreign propaganda for ages. And we don’t ban it. Part of free speech is that you have to deal with the fact that nonsense propaganda and disinformation exists. There are ways to deal with it and respond to it that don’t involve banning speech. It’s astounding to me how quickly people give up their principles out of a weird, xenophobic fear that somehow China has magic pixie dust hidden within TikTok to turn Americans’ brains to mush.

I’m sympathetic to Masnick’s argument and have yet to be convinced that the ban is a good idea. And I’m definitely not going to be convinced because House members have been shown secret information that the rest of us aren’t privvy to.

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Roger Fidler predicted the future of news delivery. But he missed a crucial piece.

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On March 4, 2024

In Media, Technology

The New York Times last week published a story by David Streitfeld on Roger Fidler, a digital journalism visionary who touted the idea of delivering news via tablet computers a good 20 years before such devices were even available. I wrote about Fidler in my 2018 book, “The Return of the Moguls: How Jeff Bezos and John Henry Are Remaking News for the Twenty-First Century.” An excerpt follows. It’s fascinating to look back at what Fidler got right and got wrong.

***

In the early 1990s, a Knight Ridder executive named Roger Fidler developed an idea that was stunningly close to the tablets and smartphones of the 2010s. I attended a conference at Columbia University at which Fidler outlined his vision for a digital tablet on which we would read newspapers and magazines — something he had been thinking about for the previous dozen or so years. The screen would have the same resolution as a glossy magazine; the devices would be flexible so you could roll one up and take it with you; and they would be so cheap that newspapers would give them away to eliminate the money-burning tasks of printing and distribution. How far ahead of his time was Fidler? Even as of 2017, we were nowhere near achieving any of those three goals.

Fidler also anticipated the choice and interactivity that would come with digital newspapers. For instance, he said that a subscriber might purchase a subscription to The New York Times’s international news, The Washington Post’s political news and her local paper’s regional news. And the tablet would have interactive capabilities so that you could, for instance, click on a restaurant ad to make a reservation. “It was not quite like Roger had descended from another planet, but he was saying some things that were simply very hard to believe at the time,” John Woolley, who worked with Fidler, said in 2012. “He had conjured up this idea of a tablet at a time when laptops were revolutionary. He was clearly a futurist. And he didn’t care what anyone believed. He never backed down.”

I have no notes from that conference, so I’m relying largely on my memory, as well as a video that Fidler put together when he was head of the Knight Ridder Information Design Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado. The prototype in the video was simultaneously retro in that the display looked exactly like a printed newspaper and futuristic in its capabilities, which included better, faster interactive graphics than we generally see today as well as sophisticated voice controls.

But keep in mind Marshall McLuhan’s admonition that the medium is the message. Fidler envisioned a revolutionary leap forward in the way we interact with text, photography, graphics, audio and video. What he did not envision was that the digital future would be altogether different from what had come before and that we would use it in ways he could not imagine. In his talk at Columbia, he said that we’d download the content we had paid for by plugging our devices into, say, our cable television box before going to bed. In the video, he also raised the possibility of something that looked like a credit card that you could take with you and use to load more content onto your device if you were away from home. What he missed was that digital newspapers would be distributed via the open web rather than a closed system controlled by publishers. Fidler could see into the future in ways that were remarkable. But in 1994, he did not mention what would turn out to be the most revolutionary change of all. Even though he brilliantly anticipated the technological revolution that was to come, he failed to foresee the cultural revolution that would accompany it.

“For most people a newspaper’s like a friend,” Fidler says in the video. “It’s somebody you know who you have come to trust. Over the last 15 years there have been many attempts to develop electronic newspapers, and many of the technologists who have been pursuing these objectives assume that information is simply a commodity, and people really don’t care where that information comes from as long as it matches their set of personal interests. I disagree with that view.”

In fact, Fidler was wrong. Most news turned out to be so generic that it is difficult to imagine anyone would ever pay for it. As I am wrapping up this chapter in late March 2017, one of the big news stories of the day is the fate of President Donald Trump’s tax proposals following the Republican Congress’ failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act — a major plank in Trump’s platform. Entering “Trump taxes” at Google News brings more than 7.3 million results — the very definition of commodity news. More than 20 years after the narrator of Fidler’s video assured viewers that people wanted “a specific newspaper with a branded identity,” there are very few types of content that readers might be persuaded to pay for: certain types of local and investigative stories that no other news organizations are publishing; personalities that distinguish a paper from its competitors, such as popular columnists; and the intelligent judgment of editors regarding what news is the most important, what’s less important, and what can be left out of the paper altogether.

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How a former Iowa newspaper’s name was hijacked to produce AI-generated clickbait

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On February 27, 2024

In Local News, Technology

Clayton County, Iowa. Photo (cc) 2011 by Jsayre64.

The Clayton County Register was a respected Iowa newspaper. Founded in 1926, it lives on, having merged with The North Iowa Times in 2020. The new paper was named the Times-Register.

But that’s not the only way that the paper lives on. Kate Knibbs reports in Wired that the domain name, claytoncountyregister.com, is being repurposed to generate investment-oriented clickbait using artificial intelligence. Indeed, if you look at the Register’s homepage right now, you’ll find a gigantic headline, “New York Community Bancorp Faces Uphill Battle Amid Regional Banking Crisis,” accompanied by what is almost certainly an AI-generated image and a byline attributed to Emmanuel Ellerbee.

Ellerbee, Knibbs tells us, has some 30,845 articles to his credit, which is a level of output that even the greediest corporate newspaper owner would respect.

Although Knibbs doesn’t use the term “pink slime,” what she found would appear to fit: it’s garbage content, written under apparently fake bylines, taking advantage of a legacy newspaper’s brand and reputation in order to suck people in. Not that whoever is behind the faux Clayton County Register much cares about trying to lure the locals.

Knibbs begins her story by telling us about an investor named Tony Eastin who stumbled upon the Register while researching a pharmaceutical stock. Much of the story is devoted to how Eastin and his friend Sandeep Abraham tried to get to the bottom of this weird tale. They weren’t entirely successful, but they did find that a Linux server in Germany and a Polish website appeared to be involved. So, too, was a Chinese operation called “the Propaganda Department of the Party Committee of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.” Knibbs writes:

Although Eastin and Abraham suspect that the network which the Register’s old site is now part of was created with straightforward moneymaking goals, they fear that more malicious actors could use the same sort of tactics to push misinformation and propaganda into search results. “This is massively threatening,” Abraham says. “We want to raise some alarm bells.”

One of the dangers of the local news crisis is that bad actors can move in and create what appears to be local content that is really anything but. There’s Pink Slime 1.0, going back about a dozen years, which employed low-wage workers in far-off locations like the Philippines to write stories for zombie newspapers. There’s Pink Slime 2.0, in which mostly right-wing websites are given semi-plausible-sounding names like the North Boston News (!) to spread political propaganda. And now, increasingly, we’re seeing examples of Pink Slime 3.0, which adds AI to the mix.

Although these sites don’t represent much of a threat at the moment, that could change. After all, the infrastructure is being put into place.

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Bluesky makes its long-awaited public debut just as Threads skepticism sets in

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On February 12, 2024

In Media, Technology

Photo (cc) 2021 by joey zanotti

Is Bluesky about to have its moment?

Since the fall of 2022, when Elon Musk acquired Twitter and proceeded to take a wrecking ball to it, those of us who are heavy users of short-form, text-based social media have been looking for a new platform. I bet heavily on Mastodon, but though I find it to be a pleasant environment most of the time, with a lot of activity and high engagement, it has not been adopted by more than a handful of news organizations, journalism think tanks, the Massachusetts political community and ordinary people. Those folks have, for the most part, remain firmly planted on Twitter/X.

Threads is a different matter. Since it debuted last summer, the platform has largely fulfilled its promise of becoming a better version of Twitter, a place to have conversations about news, journalism and other topics with less sociopathy than you encounter in Musk’s hellhole. Threads reportedly has about 130 million active monthly users, compared to 500 million on Twitter, which is pretty impressive for a service that’s less than a year old and is still rolling out features.

Unfortunately, it appears that Threads will not fulfill the hopes of its most news-obsessed users. On Friday, Mark Zuckberg’s Meta, which owns Threads, repeated previous statements that it has no intention of becoming a platform that is heavily focused on politics. Posts that the almighty algorithm deems political will not show up in the “For You” listing, which is what you see when you first log on and which is determined by software that thinks it knows what you’re interested in. Any accounts you’re already following will continue to show up, but discovering new accounts will become more difficult. The change also applies to Instagram.

According to Adam Mosseri, who runs Threads and Instagram, “we’re not talking about all of news, but rather more focused on political news or social commentary.” But as Taylor Lorenz and Naomi Nix report for The Washington Post (free link), who’s to say what’s political? They quote Ashton Pittman, news editor of the Mississippi Free Press, who tells them:

If I post about LGBTQ rights, or about being a gay man, is that political? If I post about Taylor Swift, is that political because bad actors are making everything political? Everything is political if we’re honest with ourselves — it’s just about who’s defining what’s political and who gets to define that and what does it mean?

Which brings me back to Bluesky. Unlike Threads, the platform is not fully for-profit; unlike Mastodon, it’s not a nonprofit. Rather, it’s a public benefit corporation, which means that it’s a for-profit company that must serve the public interest in some way and that reinvests any profits it makes back in the operation. Of the three major Twitter alternatives, Bluesky has garnered the most skepticism. For one thing, among Bluesky’s founders is former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who thought selling out to Musk was just fine. For another, Bluesky’s rollout has been painfully slow. Until last week, you couldn’t join without an invitation, which is why it has just 3.2 million users, far behind Threads and Twitter.

After Bluesky finally opened itself up to the public, though, the influential tech writer Mike Masnick wrote an enthusiastic post at Techdirt saying he was “pretty excited” about where the platform is heading. What has Masnick most excited is Bluesky’s roll-your-own approach to content moderation. He writes:

For example, the company has added some (still early) features that give users much more control over their experience: composable moderation and algorithmic choice. Composable moderation lets users set some of their own preferences for what they want to encounter on social media, rather than leaving it entirely up to a central provider. Some people are more willing to see sexual content, for example.

But, the algorithmic choice is perhaps even more powerful. Currently, people talk a lot about “the algorithm” and now most social networks give you one single algorithm of what they think you’ll want to see. There is often a debate among people about “what’s better: a chronological feed or the algorithmically generated feed” from the company. But that’s always been thinking too small.

With Bluesky’s algorithmic choice, anyone can make or share their own algorithms and users can choose what algorithms they want to use. In my Bluesky, for example, I have a few different algorithms that I can choose to recommend interesting stuff to me. One of them, developed by an outside developer (i.e., not Bluesky), Skygaze, is a “For You” feed that … is actually good? Unlike centralized social media, Skygaze’s goal with its feed is not to improve engagement numbers for Bluesky.

For some time now, I’ve been using Threads, Mastodon and Bluesky more or less equally on the theory that we’re a long way from knowing which platform, if any, will emerge as the main alternative to Twitter. (I’m also still on Twitter, mainly for professional purposes, though I’ve locked my account and post less frequently there than on the other platforms.) Even though I have far fewer followers on Bluesky than elsewhere, I’ve found the engagement to be quite good and the content consistently interesting — more so than on Mastodon, and with less crap than on Threads.

We will never go back to the days when there was one platform where everyone gathered, for better or worse. But Bluesky seems like a worthy entry into the social media wars now that it’s (finally) open to the public.

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Substack faces a crisis after Casey Newton’s decision to leave over Nazi content

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On January 12, 2024

In Media, Technology

Substack, the newsletter and blogging platform that got so much attention a few years ago, is in a world of trouble. Casey Newton is taking his Platformer newsletter about social media and tech to a nonprofit, open-source self-publishing service called Ghost after he says his efforts to persuade Substack to pull pro-Nazi content failed to result in a meaningful change of policy. The controversy has been building since November, when Jonathan M. Katz wrote a piece for The Atlantic headlined “Substack Has a Nazi Problem.”

Of course, this is a crisis of Substack’s own making, and it could resolve it quickly if its executives choose to do so. But an obstinate refusal to deviate from what they see as their commitment to free speech has so far led them to do nothing — or at least not enough to keep a highly regarded publication like Platformer from leaving. In a December post that has been widely criticized and ridiculed on Substack Notes, co-founder Hamish McKenzie wrote in part:

I just want to make it clear that we don’t like Nazis either — we wish no-one held those views. But some people do hold those and other extreme views. Given that, we don’t think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away — in fact, it makes it worse.

We believe that supporting individual rights and civil liberties while subjecting ideas to open discourse is the best way to strip bad ideas of their power.

The problem, as I wrote for GBH News three years ago, is that Substack has two separate businesses. One is a solid contribution to the tech community: great software that makes it easy to self-publish and solicit payments from your audience. The other is to establish itself as a major force in the publishing world, paying celebrities like Newton (he says Substack provided him with health-insurance subsidies and legal assistance) and promoting their content. Now problems with the second business are threatening to overwhelm the first.

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The internet itself can be a pretty terrible place, filled with terrorists, pedophiles and, yes, Nazis. But the net is also neutral. Substack, like Facebook, Twitter/X, Threads and most other platforms, is anything but, promoting certain types of content for eyeballs, clicks and profit. Substack is not just hosting Nazis, it is arguably pushing their content in front of readers and making money from it. Newton wrote:

Substack’s aspirations now go far beyond web hosting. It touts the value of its network of publications as a primary reason to use its product, and has built several tools to promote that network. It encourages writers to recommend other Substack publications. It sends out a weekly digest of publications for readers to consider subscribing to.

Substack has made itself a congenial home for writers once associated with the left who’ve since moved right, such as Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi. It will be interesting to see if they say something. Perhaps we’ll hear from Bari Weiss, a heterodox conservative who occasionally shows some backbone and who publishes a site called The Free Press on Substack.

The writer I’ll be watching most closely, though, is Heather Cox Richardson, a Boston College historian who is perhaps Substack’s biggest star. She has to be thinking about moving her “Letters from an American” to another platform, but I haven’t seen anything from her so far. If she would like to ghost Substack and move to Ghost, though, I’m sure Casey Newton would lend a hand.

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The Bard of AI

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On December 15, 2023

In Technology

I haven’t played enough with the newest version of Google Bard to know whether it’s better than ChatGPT, but Bard has some advantages. You don’t have to log in — if you’re like most people, you’re already logged in through Google. The database is more up to date: It knows that Maura Healey is governor, whereas ChatGPT still thinks Charlie Baker is in the corner office. And it provides links. My misgivings about artificial intelligence aside, I’m impressed.

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Despite Elon Musk’s vile behavior, a shrinking Twitter continues to dominate

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On December 7, 2023

In Media, Technology

Photo (cc) by François Cante

Twitter’s resilience despite Elon Musk’s toxic leadership has been something of a surprise to me. A little more than a year after he took the helm, the platform that he (and virtually no one else) calls X continues to dominate short-form text-based social media. Mastodon and Bluesky never really caught on, though they have their supporters; users of Mastodon, a decentralized nonprofit, are probably just as happy about that, since they never seemed all that eager to welcome millions of Twitter refugees. The newest alternative, Meta’s Threads, is the only one that has achieved anything close to critical mass.

These realities are driven home in a new piece by Sara Guaglione of Digiday, who reports that some major news publishers have actually cut back on the efforts they’re putting into Threads and are sticking with Twitter. But there is some good news for Threads: it continues to grow, and it’s now expanding into Europe; and publishers would probably do more with the platform if Meta would provide them with the metrics they need to understand their audience.

“There’s a pull to Threads — it’s a good platform, it’s a good [and] improving product,” Matt Karolian, the general manager of Boston.com, told Guaglione. “And there’s an element of being pushed away from X, where there’s only so much time you can spend on it a day now before you just want to pull your hair out. It does feel like a confluence of factors that have really helped it grow.”

But even though The Boston Globe (of which Boston.com is a part), CNN and The New York Times report increased engagement on Threads, others, including the BBC and The Guardian U.S., have cut back. “For now,” Guaglione wrote, “Threads remains a place for experimentation.”

In addition to failing to provide publishers with the data they want, Threads also continues to lack key features for news consumers that they’ve taken for granted on Twitter. There are no hashtags and no lists, making it difficult to follow an ongoing story or a group of journalists or news organizations. Those may be coming at some point, although Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram (Threads is actually part of Instagram as well as the larger Zuckerborg), has made it clear that he doesn’t see news as a priority.

That could change as Twitter continues to shrink and as advertisers flee in response to Musk’s recent boost of a horrendous antisemitic post. At a public event, Musk apologized for the post but then told advertisers to “go fuck yourself.” CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy recently wrote that Threads now ranks No. 2 in the Apple App Store’s list of free apps and that Twitter had fallen to No. 56.

For years, Twitter was the chief watering hole for media people and politicians, and those days are not coming back — the emerging social media landscape is likely to be much more diffuse, and it would be a good thing if we all spent less time with it anyway. But even if Twitter keeps losing audience, advertisers and relevance, those early predictions that it would quickly go the way of MySpace proved premature.

Instant update: I see that “topic tags,” which appear to be hashtags of a sort, have just popped up on Threads. It doesn’t appear that you can roll your own, but this bears further investigation.

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Joan Donovan claims she was pushed out of Harvard to make Meta happy

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On December 4, 2023

In Technology

Disinformation expert Joan Donovan, who was pushed out of the Harvard Kennedy School earlier this year, is now claiming that the dean, Douglas Elmendorf, wanted her out so as not to offend Meta, whose charitable arm had pledged to give $500 million to Harvard. The university denies the charges leveled by Donovan, who is now at Boston University. Joseph Menn of The Washington Post has the story, and here is a free link.

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