Meta – Media Nation

In a lawsuit against Meta, the state’s highest court will rule on the limits of Section 230

Attorney General Andrea Campbell. Photo (cc) 2022 by Dan Kennedy.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 protects website owners from liability over third-party content. The classic example would be an anonymous commenter who libels someone. The offended party would be able to sue the commenter but not the publishing platform, although the platform might be required to turn over information that would help identify the commenter.

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But where is the line between passively hosting third-party content and activity promoting certain types of material in order to boost engagement and, thus, profitability? That question will go before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court on Friday, reports Jennifer Smith of CommonWealth Beacon.

At issue is a lawsuit brought against Meta by 42 state attorneys general, including Andrea Campbell of Massachusetts. Meta operates Facebook, Instagram, Threads and other social media platforms, and it has long been criticized for using algorithms and other tactics that keep users hooked on content that, in some cases, provokes anger and depression, even suicide. Smith writes:

The Massachusetts complaint alleges that Meta violated state consumer protection law and created a public nuisance by deliberately designing Instagram with features like infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications, and “like” buttons to addict young users, then falsely represented the platform’s safety to the public. The company has also been reckless with age verification, the AG argues, and allowed children under 13 years old to access its content.

Meta and its allies counter that Section 230 protects not just the third-party content they host but also how Facebook et al. display that content to its users.

In an accompanying opinion piece, attorney Megan Iorio of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, computer scientist Laura Edelson of Northeastern University and policy analyst Yaël Eisenstat of Cybersecurity for Democracy argue that Section 230 was not designed to protect website operators from putting their thumbs on the scales to favor one type of third-party content over another. As they put it in describing the amicus brief they have filed:

Our brief explains how the platform features at the heart of the Commonwealth’s case — things like infinite scroll, autoplay, the timing and batching of push notifications, and other tactics borrowed from the gambling industry — have nothing to do with content moderation; they are designed to elicit a behavior on the part of the user that furthers the company’s own business goals.

As Smith makes clear, this is a long and complex legal action, and the SJC is being asked to rule only on the narrow question of whether Campbell can move ahead with the lawsuit to which she has lent the state’s support. (Double disclosure: I am a member of CommonWealth Beacon’s editorial advisory aboard as well as a fellow Northeastern professor.)

I’ve long argued (as I did in this GBH News commentary from 2020) that, just as a matter of logic, favoring some types of content over others is a publishing activity that goes beyond the mere passive hosting of third-party content, and thus website operators should be liable for whatever harm those decisions create. That argument has not found much support in the courts, however. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Why a philanthopic effort to bolster public broadcasting may harm local news outlets

Major philanthropies are stepping up to offset some of the cuts to public television and radio, Benjamin Mullin reports in The New York Times (gift link). But will it be enough? And what possible downstream effects might there be on local news organizations that also depend heavily on foundation money?

As we all know, the Republican Congress, acting at the behest of Donald Trump, eliminated funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting earlier this summer. The CPB, a semi-independent agency, had been set to spend $500 million over the next two years.

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PBS and NPR receive most of their funding from grants and donations by, well, viewers and listeners like you, but their member stations — especially in less affluent and rural areas — are more dependent on government funding. Both national networks have been cutting their budgets in an attempt to help their member stations survive.

According to Mullin, foundations such as Knight, MacArthur, Ford and others have come up with an emergency $26.5 million to keep those stations afloat with a goal of reaching $50 million this year. “We believe it’s crucial to have a concerted, coordinated effort to make sure that the stations that most critically need these funds right now have a pathway to get them,” Maribel Pérez Wadsworth, the president and chief executive of the Knight Foundation, was quoted as saying.

Continue reading “Why a philanthopic effort to bolster public broadcasting may harm local news outlets”

Another Mass. judge orders a magazine to turn over its reporting materials; plus, media notes

Illustration produced by AI using DALL-E

One step forward, one step back.

Less than two weeks after state Superior Court Judge Beverly Cannone reversed herself and ruled that Boston magazine reporter Gretchen Voss did not have to turn over notes she took during an off-the-record interview with murder suspect Karen Read, another judge is demanding that a journalist assist prosecutors in a different murder case.

On Monday, Superior Court Judge William Sullivan ordered that The New Yorker produce audio recordings of interviews with the husband of Lindsay Clancy, who’s been charged in the killing of her three children at their Duxbury home.

And there’s more, according to Boston Globe reporter Travis Andersen, who writes that the magazine will be required to produce “all audio recordings of Patrick Clancy, two of his relatives, and two friends who spoke to the magazine for a story that ran in October” as well as “relevant interview notes, text messages, voicemails, and emails in possession of the publisher or reporter Eren Orbey.” Orbey’s story on the Clancy case was published last October.

I would assume that The New Yorker and its corporate owner, Condé Nast, will appeal, although the Globe story doesn’t address that issue. Last Friday, Charlie McKenna of MassLive reported that Judge Sullivan had allowed the prosecution’s motion for The New Yorker’s reporting materials and that Clancy’s lawyer, Kevin Reddington, did not object. The magazine had not responded to the demand, a prosecutor told Sullivan.

There is no First Amendment right for reporters to protect their confidential sources or, as in this case, their reporting materials. Massachusetts does not have a shield law, and protections based on state court precedent are regarded as weak.

The problem is that forcing reporters to turn over their notes, recordings and other materials transforms them into an arm of the prosecution and interferes with their ability to do serve as an independent monitor of power. Sullivan made the wrong call, and I hope he — like Judge Cannone — has second thoughts.

Media notes

• That didn’t take long. After Google Maps changed “Gulf of Mexico” to “Gulf of America,” opponents of Donald Trump took to social media to announce that they were moving to other platforms. Well, on Tuesday evening Microsoft and Apple began to follow suit. Honestly, no one should have been surprised.

• The fracturing continues. BuzzFeed may become the latest company to unveil an alternative to Twitter/X, according to Max Tani of Semafor, as it seeks to offer “an alternative to the rightward, masculine drift of American public culture.” Well, good luck with that. After shutting down its news division, BuzzFeed is now cutting its HuffPost subsidiary. I have to say that Bluesky is working pretty well for me as my main short-form social-media outlet.

• Back to his roots. U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., is demanding answers from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg about ads running on Instagram for a program that uses artificial intelligence to create fake nude photos of real people. The ads violate Meta’s terms of service, reports Emanuel Maiberg of 404 Media. But let’s not forget that Zuckerberg created a predecessor site to Facebook as a way to rate the hotness of Harvard women.

SCOTUS’ unsurprising decision on TikTok lays bare our hypocrisy about data privacy

Newsday account of Murdoch becoming a U.S. citizen, Sept. 5, 1985

We shouldn’t have been especially surprised that the Supreme Court voted unanimously to uphold the TikTok ban. After all, we have a long legal tradition when it comes to banning the foreign ownership of media companies.

Lest we forget, Rupert Murdoch was able to take his first steps in launching the Fox News Channel only by becoming an American citizen. The Australian media mogul took the oath in 1985 so he could purchase seven local television stations owned by Metromedia. FCC rules barred non-citizens from owning more than 20% of a U.S. broadcast entity.

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Murdoch’s acquisition of Metromedia meant that he briefly owned WCVB-TV (Channel 5). Since Murdoch also owned the Boston Herald and the FCC forbade cross-ownership of a TV station and newspaper in the same market, Murdoch flipped WCVB to Hearst, which has owned it ever since. (This is unrelated to Murdoch’s failed attempt a few years later to hold on to Boston’s WFXT-Channel 25 while keeping the Herald. In that case, he ended up selling Channel 25 and retaining the Herald, though he later sold that, too.)

FCC jurisdiction applies almost exclusively to the dying universe of broadcast television and radio. The TikTok ban was approved by an act of Congress, passed by overwhelming bipartisan majorities and signed into law by President Biden. Donald Trump has indicated that he wants to work out a deal so TikTok can remain up and running in the U.S., and perhaps he will. So this entire episode may turn out to be a footnote.

What’s notable about the Supreme Court decision is that the justices were not impressed with the government’s contention that TikTok could be used to distributed propaganda at the behest of the Chinese government. That’s as it should be. According to Amy Howe’s account of the decision, republished by SCOTUSblog, Justice Neil Gorsuch’s concurrence underscored that the issue was foreign ownership, not free speech.

Gorsuch, Howe notes, “emphasized that the court was correct in not ‘endorsing the government’s asserted interest in preventing “the covert manipulation of content”’ to justify the TikTok ban. ‘One man’s “covert content manipulation,”’ he observed, ‘is another’s “editorial discretion.”’”

The real problem with foreign ownership is that the Chinese government could demand that TikTok (I’m not going to get into the complex arrangement between TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance) turn over the massive amounts of user data that it hoovers up in order to fine-tune its algorithm and to sell you stuff. Of course, American-owned platforms do the same thing, and you might think there’s not a great deal of moral difference between Xi Jinping or Mark Zuckerberg (or Co-President-Elect Elon Musk) having access to your data. And you might even be right. But the legal distinction strikes me as fairly obvious.

Is there hypocrisy at work here? You bet, because the U.S. government has long claimed the right to access user data from American-based platforms in the name of national security. As Andrew K. Woods writes for Lawfare:

The Court noted: “TikTok Ltd. is subject to Chinese laws that require it to ‘assist or cooperate’ with the Chinese Government’s ‘intelligence work’ and to ensure that the Chinese Government has ‘the power to access and control private data’ the company holds.”

The Court could have written a nearly identical sentence about Meta or Google, vis-à-vis American law, like this: “Meta is subject to American law that requires it to assist or cooperate with the American government’s intelligence work and to ensure that the American government has the power to access and control private data the company holds.”

American firms are subject to American laws — like the Stored Communications Act, especially as modified by the CLOUD Act, and intelligence laws like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — that give the U.S. government legal means to access customer data, especially foreign customer data, for national security and intelligence purposes.

The ban takes effect Sunday, and the Biden White House has said it’s not going to make any efforts to enforce it with Trump taking office the next day. Trump was originally all in favor of the ban; then one of his billionaire donors urged him to change his mind. It didn’t hurt that Trump’s TikTok account turned out to be popular with his supporters.

So it seems like the most likely outcome is that Trump announces an extension while trying to work out some sort of settlement.

Mark Zuckerberg’s capitulation to Trump is all about his relentless pursuit of profits

Mark Zuckerberg. Photo (cc) 2019 by Billionaires Success.

On Tuesday I spoke with Jon Keller of Boston’s WBZ-TV (Channel 4) about Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to eliminate independent fact-checking and tone down the moderation on Meta’s social-media various platforms, which include Facebook, Instagram and Threads.

Among other things, Zuckerberg said he’s going to let pretty much anything go on immigration and gender on the grounds that stamping out hate speech is “out of touch with mainstream discourse.” He’s also copying the Community Notes feature from Elon Musk, who has turned over fact-checking to users at his Twitter/X platform.

For all the details, I recommend this Wall Street Journal article (gift link) and Zuckerberg’s own video announcement.

Jon and I were only able to hit a few points in our conversation, so I want to say a bit more. What Zuckerberg is doing amounts to unconditional surrender to Donald Trump. Four and five years ago, Facebook struggled to clamp down on dangerous misinformation about COVID and suspended Trump from the platform after he fomented the attempted insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021. Now Zuckerberg is giving in completely.

Essentially we have three billionaire tech moguls who are doing everything they can to enable Trump. Musk, of course, isn’t just enabling Trump; he’s moved in with him, and his bizarre pronouncements about everything from the alleged criminality of the British government to the size of newborns’ heads now carry with them the imprimatur of our authoritarian president-elect.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is systematically destroying The Washington Post, one of our four national newspapers, for no discernible reason other than to curry favor with Trump. And now Zuckerberg has signaled his willingness to surrender unconditionally.

The dispiriting reality is that Zuckerberg has placed profit above all other values for many years, no matter what the human cost. According to Amnesty International, Facebook was complicit in genocide against the Rohingya people in Myanmar. His products have been linked to depression and suicide among teenagers. If Zuckerberg cared about any of this, he would have taken steps to make his platforms safer even at the expense of some of his profit margin. To be clear, Zuckerberg obviously doesn’t support genocide or suicide, and he has taken some steps — but those measures have been inadequate.

We should always keep in mind what the business model is for social media, whether it be Facebook, Threads, Twitter or TikTok. All of them employ opaque algorithms to show users more of the content that keeps them engaged so that they can sell them more stuff. And studies have demonstrated that what keeps users engaged is what makes them angry and upset. This is protected by Section 230, a federal law that holds internet publishers legally harmless for any content posted by third-party users.

As Twitter has continued its descent into the right-wing fever swamps, two platforms have emerged as alternatives — Threads and the much-smaller Bluesky. The latter has received several big bumps since the election, and is likely to get another one now that Zuckerberg has harmed the Threads brand. Bluesky doesn’t use a centralized algorithm — you’re free to use one designed by other users or none at all. (That’s also the case with Mastodon, but Bluesky has zoomed well ahead in the public consciousness.)

Unfortunately, Bluesky also lacks the capacity to engage in the kind of fact-checking and moderation that Meta once used. And with growth comes toxicity.

I’ve seen a number of folks on Threads saying on Tuesday that they’re leaving for Bluesky, just as many others said last year that they were leaving Twitter for Threads. It’s all futile. What we need is less social media and more real human connection. What Zuckerberg did Tuesday didn’t destroy something great. Rather, he made something that was already bad considerably worse.

The Washington Post suffers another self-inflicted blow as Ann Telnaes quits over a killed cartoon

The rough draft of the Ann Telnaes cartoon that was killed by her editor. Via Telnaes’ newsletter, Open Windows.

The latest self-inflicted blow to The Washington Post has been rocketing around the internet since Friday. Ann Telnaes, a Pulitzer Prize winner whose wickedly funny editorial cartoons have graced the Post’s opinion section since 2008, quit after opinion editor David Shipley killed a cartoon that made fun of billionaires for sucking up to Donald Trump — including Post owner Jeff Bezos. Telnaes writes in her newsletter, Open Windows:

As an editorial cartoonist, my job is to hold powerful people and institutions accountable. For the first time, my editor prevented me from doing that critical job. So I have decided to leave the Post. I doubt my decision will cause much of a stir and that it will be dismissed because I’m just a cartoonist. But I will not stop holding truth to power through my cartooning, because as they say, “Democracy dies in darkness.”

She’s wrong about one thing: Her resignation has created an enormous stir. Right now it’s trending at The New York Times and is No. 7 on The Boston Globe‘s most-read list. It’s all over social media as well.

The rough draft of Telnaes’ cartoon (above) shows Bezos and fellow billionaires Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Sam Altman of Open AI and Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong kneeling before a giant statue of Trump. Three are holding bags of money in supplication. I’m not sure what Soon-Shiong is doing, though he appears to be wielding a container of lipstick. Mickey Mouse somehow figures into it as well.

Shipley, who was hired in 2022, is trying to do damage control, saying in a statement reported by New York Times media reporter Benjamin Mullin that he was simply engaged in normal editing and believed that the Post was running too much commentary about Trump’s billionaire courtiers:

Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force. My decision was guided by the fact that we had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and had already scheduled another column — this one a satire — for publication. The only bias was against repetition.

I’m going to take Shipley at his word. Opinion editors should assert themselves from time to time and insist on less repetition. But not in this particular instance. Given the fraught nature of Bezos’ recent Trump-friendly moves, including his decision to kill the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris and to donate $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund (which is what Telnaes was mocking in her cartoon), Shipley should have left this one go. By killing Telnaes cartoon, he acted in a deeply irresponsible manner at the worst possible time. And he lost one of his brightest stars.

I’ve enjoyed Telnaes’ work for years. During the Trump presidency, she often drew animated cartoons that were published on the Post’s digital platforms. Under her skillful pen, Trump was a grotesque figure, covered with makeup with his long red tie often reaching the floor.

Sadly, we are at a moment when editorial cartooning in general is on the decline, and it’s not a given that Telnaes will be picked up by another paper. The Times, which has been scooping up disaffected Posties, famously does not run editorial cartoons. Shipley says he hopes Telnaes will reconsider, but that seems unlikely.

No doubt Telnaes won’t come cheap. But several papers distinguished themselves with tough anti-Trump opinionating during the 2024 campaign, including The Boston Globe and The Philadelphia Inquirer, and I hope one of them sees fit to open up their checkbook and bring her on. The Atlantic, which like the Times has been hiring former Post staffers, is a possible landing spot as well.

Bluesky is having its moment; plus, Soon-Shiong reverses himself, and a local-news event in Ipswich

From the moment that Elon Musk bought Twitter in late 2022 and took a wrecking ball to it, millions of appalled users have sought alternatives. Mastodon, a decentralized nonprofit, got some early buzz, though it failed to gain mass traction. Threads, part of the Meta universe, has enjoyed some success, attracting 275 million users; but many of those users are also disenchanted with an algorithm that plays down news and politics.

Now Bluesky is having its moment. The most Twitter-like of the new platforms, Bluesky has experienced a surge of a million new users since the election, attracting the attention of The New York Times, The Associated Press, Slate and others. Its current user base of about 15 million makes it far smaller than Threads, but its customizable feeds, lists and starter packs, as well as its lack of an algorithm, have led many of us to conclude that it’s a better tool for sharing and discussing journalism.

As media writer Oliver Darcy puts it: “But while the masses might be joining Threads, power users in media and politics seem to now be preferring Bluesky. That is where the conversation is now forming. Even on Threads, one of the biggest topics of discussion this week is Bluesky.”

Bluesky got off to a slow start because for quite a long while you could only join by invitation. Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s involvement was a poison pill for some, though he has since moved on. Today Bluesky is owned by a public benefit corporation — a for-profit company that nevertheless must adhere to some nonprofit-like principles such as “extending benefits to stakeholders like communities and employees,” as Kiplinger puts it.

In other words, Bluesky, unlike Threads and Twitter, is not under the control of an erratic billionaire.

Twitter/X still has nearly 500 million users worldwide, but it has been overrun by trolls, bots and various right-wing extremists, including Musk himself. The Guardian created a stir Wednesday when it announced that it was mostly leaving Twitter, calling it a “toxic media platform.” But many news outlets continue to make heavy use of Twitter.

Six to 10 years ago, when Twitter was at its most useful, it was a gathering place for liberals, conservatives and moderates. Unfortunately, neither Threads nor Bluesky has been able to replicate that vibe, as their user bases are overwhelmingly liberal and progressive. And thus our national discourse continues to become more polarized.

Soon-Shiong comes clean

Patrick Soon-Shiong, the other billionaire newspaper owner who killed an endorsement of Kamala Harris just days before the election, is now saying that his daughter was right all along when she cited Harris’ pro-Israel position in the war in Gaza as the reason that his Los Angeles Times did not weigh in on the presidential race.

“Somebody had asked me, ‘was that the reason?’ I said, ‘well, that wasn’t the only reason.’ Clearly, that was one of the reasons, and there are many other reasons, but I think that should be exposed really transparently about all the reasons,” he told CNN reporters Liam Reilly and Hadas Gold.

Soon-Shiong had previously denied a claim in The New York Times by his daughter, Nika, that the family had decided not to endorse because of Gaza. Instead, he said that he wanted his paper to move away from endorsements, and that he killed the Harris endorsement because the editorial board had ignored his directive to put together a nonpartisan guide to Harris’ and Donald Trump’s stands on the issues.

Now it appears that Soon-Shiong was being less than candid — or, as former LA Times journalist Matt Pearce writes, “Well, Patrick Soon-Shiong lied.” Pearce adds:

If you own large newspaper and have strong opinions about Israel’s war in Gaza, and those opinions about Gaza directly affect how you influence the newspaper’s engagement with politics and the public during an election, then you should probably print your opinion about Gaza in the newspaper you own instead of publicly dumping on your employees and claiming you’d asked them to do some other nonsense that you hadn’t actually asked them to do, and then lying to reporters about your opinions on Gaza not having influenced your political decisionmaking while publicly scolding your daughter for telling the New York Times hey my dad did this because of Gaza, which you followed by writing an internal email to your chief operating officer and executive editor to more or less elaborate at length that hey I did this because of Gaza (feelings which themselves have already gotten watered down in the only-sort-of-coming-clean interview with CNN).

The other billionaire non-endorser, of course, is Jeff Bezos, who canceled a Harris endorsement in The Washington Post at the last minute and claimed he had decided the Post should stop endorsing candidates.

There is a third billionaire non-endorser as well: Glen Taylor of The Minnesota Star Tribune, whose opinion editor announced back in August that the paper would no longer endorse. As my co-author and podcast partner Ellen Clegg wrote for What Works, that was enough to prompt outrage among former Strib opinion journalists, a group of whom published their own Harris endorsement independently.

Please come to Ipswich

If you’re on the North Shore, I’ll be moderating a panel of local-news leaders today at 6 p.m. at the True North Ale Company in Ipswich. The event is free, although donations are requested. Please register here.

The panel is being held to mark the fifth anniversary of Ipswich Local News, whose publisher, John Muldoon, will be a panelist. He’ll be joined by Kris Olson of The Marblehead Current, Erika Brown of The Manchester Cricket and Jack Lawrence of the soon-to-be-launched Hamilton-Wenham News.

Yes, Bezos congratulated Biden in 2020; plus, liberals flee from Twitter to Threads — to Bluesky?

Jeff Bezos. Painting (cc) 2017 by thierry ehrmann.

Amazon billionaire and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos raised eyebrows, and hackles, when he logged on to Twitter/X on Wednesday and posted a congratulatory note to Donald Trump:

Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory. No nation has bigger opportunities. Wishing @realDonaldTrump all success in leading and uniting the America we all love.

The tweet immediately angered Trump critics, who were quick to point out that it came shortly after Bezos killed a Post endorsement of Kamala Harris that had been already written and was ready to go. Bezos claimed that decision was nothing more than a reflection of his belief that the paper should stop endorsing candidates, but the timing was suspicious, to say the least.

It didn’t help that Bezos failed to offer similar congratulations on Twitter to Joe Biden in 2020. One Twitter user, @WhiteHouseAMA, pulled up Bezos’ 2016 congrats to Trump and commented: “Jeff tweeted congratulations to Trump in 2016 and 2024. No tweet exists for Biden in 2020. He didn’t kill the WaPo endorsement of Harris because he wanted to be non-partisan, he did it because he is a partisan.”

But wait.

Writing in Newsweek, Alex Gonzales reported that Bezos did, in fact, congratulate Biden in 2020, except that he did it on Instagram rather than Twitter — and he did so rather fulsomely: “Unity, empathy, and decency are not characteristics of a bygone era. Congratulations President-elect @JoeBiden and Vice President-elect @KamalaHarris. By voting in record numbers, the American people proved again that our democracy is strong.” The message is accompanied by a black-and-white photo of Biden and Harris celebrating.

Newsweek added the Instagram update in a correction, showing how widely it was believed that Bezos had not congratulated Biden four years ago.

The immediate outrage among anti-Trump forces demonstrates the impossible dilemma that Washington Post journalists now face in proving to their audience that they remain independent. Though Bezos was within his rights to cancel the Harris endorsement, it was an unspeakably bad look for him to do so in the final days of the campaign, making it seem like he was truckling under in the event of a Trump victory — which now, of course, has come to pass.

It hasn’t helped that the cancellation followed months of controversy over the Post’s ethically challenged publisher, Will Lewis. If Trump is the first convicted felon to be elected president, then surely Lewis is the first Post publisher to be under investigation by Scotland Yard. I continue to trust the independence of the Post’s newsroom, but I’m watching for any signs that I shouldn’t.

Meanwhile, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg took to Threads on Wednesday to offer his own cheery greetings to Trump, writing, “Congratulations to President Trump on a decisive victory. We have great opportunities ahead of us as a country. Looking forward to working with you and your administration.”

Threads is just one of the many platforms Zuckerberg controls; the most prominent are Facebook and Instagram. Threads has also been by far the most successful of the would-be alternatives to Twitter that sprang up after Trump uber-influencer Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, acquired it and started taking a wrecking ball to it in late 2022.

Threads has proved to be especially popular with liberals fleeing the extreme right-wingers and white nationalists whom Musk enabled on Twitter. And yet Adam Mosseri, the Meta executive who runs Threads and Instagram, has gone out of his way to play down political news in Threads’ algorithm, leading to frustration and anger among a number of users. Messages have been removed for no reason, too, as Washington Post technology reporter Will Oremus has noted.

Even before Zuckerberg’s congratulatory post, some Threads users were leaving and setting up shop on Bluesky, the most prominent short-form platform after Twitter and Threads. Bluesky is owned by a public-benefit corporation and as such is not subject to the whims of a billionaire owner. It also has much better personalization tools than either Twitter or Threads.

Bluesky, though, has only a fraction of the users that its larger rivals have — about 12 million total versus more than 600 million active monthly users at Twitter and 175 million at Threads. Personally, I’m trying to give equal attention to Threads and Bluesky, but it’s hard to know whether Bluesky will ever break through.

After all, it’s a billionaires’ world, and we’re just living in it.

April Alonso of Cicero Independiente tells us how a bilingual news project serves its community

April Alonso. Photo by Michael Izquierdo.

On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with April Alonso, co-founder and digital editor of Cicero Independiente outside of Chicago. The nonprofit bilingual news outlet covers the communities of Cicero and Berwyn in Illinois.

Cicero Independiente and MuckRock, a Boston-based investigative news organization that specializes in public records and investigative reporting, won the 2024 Victor McElheny Award for Local Science Journalism, given by MIT’s Knight Science Journalism Program, for an investigation of air quality called “The Air We Breathe.”

April has an extensive background as a multimedia content creator. She was a multimedia fellow for The Chicago Reporter, and served as a multimedia content creator for “La Verdad,” a bilingual podcast.

I’ve got a Quick Take about a town north of Vancouver, in British Columbia, that has learned a bitter lesson about Canada’s law forcing Facebook’s parent company, Meta, to pay for news. The law has led to a rise in disinformation with fewer effective ways to combat it. Meta’s greed is at the heart of this, of course. But so, too, is the failure of government officials to realize that their proposed solution to help local news outlets would backfire in an ugly way.

Ellen’s Quick Take is on a new philanthropic effort created by The Minnesota Star Tribune. It’s called the Local News Fund, and it is soliciting donations supporting statewide journalism that will be matched by a $500,000 grant from a Minnesota foundation.

You can listen to our conversation here, or you can subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

A news outlet in Haverhill, Mass., pushes its newsletter to fight algorithmic Facebook censorship

Tim Coco, general manager of WHAV in Haverhill, Mass.

Facebook’s brain-dead algorithm is censoring important public-safety information, reports WHAV in Haverhill, Massachusetts. WHAV is a nonprofit news organization with a low-power/online radio station as well as a website.

According to WHAV general manager Tim Coco:

In the last week, a local news warning about the sinkhole along the southbound lanes of Interstate 495 near Ward Hill was flagged as spam and removed by one social media site. Another blocked WHAV story was news of possible restoration of Haverhill’s 1845-era (gun) powder house. The tech giant behind these removals piles on with intimidation by writing “Repeatedly breaking our rules can cause more account restrictions.”

Even more mind-boggling, Coco writes, is that when the Haverhill Police Department attempted to share WHAV’s item on the sinkhole, Facebook removed that, too.

This is nothing new for Facebook. In “What Works in Community News,” the book that Ellen Clegg and I wrote, we tell the story of an emergency route during a wildfire that the sheriff’s department had shared with The Mendocino Voice in Northern California. The Voice posted it on its Facebook page, one of its primary distribution channels — and then watched in alarm as it disappeared. In the excerpt below, we talked with Kate Maxwell, then the publisher of the Voice, and Adrian Fernandez Baumann, then the editor:

The sheriff’s department asked the Voice to get the word out that people living in the national forest would run into danger if they tried to evacuate through the nearby community of Covelo. It was potentially lifesaving information, but Facebook took it down. “It had like a thousand shares in an hour,” said Maxwell. “Facebook flagged that post and deleted it.” The article was restored about a half-hour later following an uproar from the community. Maxwell said she never got a good explanation of what happened, even after talking with someone from Facebook at a conference. Maybe it was because the algorithms identified it as fake news. Maybe, as Baumann speculated, it was because the article included a reference to “Indian Dick Road.”

Coco doesn’t identify Facebook as the culprit, but the screenshots that he posted are clearly from that platform. He’s asking his readers and listeners in the Haverhill area to stop relying on social media for WHAV stories and instead to subscribe directly to the news outlet’s daily email newsletter.

Coco, by the way, is in our book and has been a guest on the “What Works” podcast.

Facebook’s parent company, Meta, is also getting swamped with complaints about entirely harmless posts being removed from its Threads platform because of algorithmic decisions being made with no human involvement. I can speak from personal experience, too. Twice over the past year or so, I’ve responded to questions asking about great song lyrics, and I’ve gone with “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die,” from Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues.” Both time, my posts were removed from Facebook and Threads, and I was given a warning.

So let me repeat something I’ve said a number of times: News organizations should not rely on social media any more than absolutely necessary. Do what Coco is doing: Push newsletter subscriptions, because that’s a platform that you control and own.