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.
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.
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.
Now here’s a great idea. In New York City, a public-private partnership is spending $3 million to boost journalism in the city’s high schools. The program, called Journalism for All, aims to quadruple the number of Black and Latino students who are studying journalism, according to Claire Fahy of The New York Times (gift link).
High school newspapers, whether in print or digital, have been on the wane in New York and across the country in recent years, although the Student Press Law Center told the Times that the extent of the decline has not been reliably tracked.
Among other things, Journalism for All will help launch student publications by providing them with $15,000 in seed money. In addition, four students from each of the schools that are being served will be able to take part in summer internships at local news organizations.
Fahy reports that California, Illinois and Texas are also providing assistance to high school journalism programs. As I wrote this summer for CommonWealth Beacon, efforts are being made to revive a special commission to study the local news crisis in Massachusetts after the first attempt disappeared down a black hole.
Nurturing high school journalism programs and publications in Massachusetts ought to be something that gets serious consideration.
Listening to Vermont voters
It’s back to the future in Vermont, where the state’s public media operation is covering the election campaign by listening to voters and focusing on the issues they say are important rather than dwelling on the horse race and polls.
Boston Globe media reporter Aidan Ryan writes that journalists for Vermont Public, comprising television, radio and digital, “have spent the year speaking to more than 600 residents at diners, gas stations, and concerts about state and local politics across all 14 Vermont counties.”
It’s an effort known as the Citizens Agenda, but it’s hardly a new idea. Originally known as public journalism or civic journalism, the notion of shaping political coverage around the concerns of actual people was briefly popular in the 1990s. Among other things, the Globe itself engaged in a public journalism effort in covering the 1996 New Hampshire primary.
New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen is advising Vermont Public on implementing the Citizens Agenda; Rosen was also a leader of the public journalism movement in the 1990s, even writing a book about it called “What Are Journalists For?”
It was a good idea then, and it’s a good idea today.
Hacked emails, then and now
One of the odder developments in the 2024 campaign is that three news organizations — The Washington Post, The New York Times and Politico — have reportedly received hacked emails from the Donald Trump campaign but have chosen not to publish anything from them, as Will Sommer and Elahe Izadi reported (gift link) in August for the Post.
Obviously this is quite a departure from 2016, when the news media eagerly passed along emails from Democrats associated with Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Then as now, the leaks come from a foreign adversary — Russia eight years ago, Iran today. Then as now, the actual content of the emails may be of little interest.
I suppose we shouldn’t complain if news executives learned a lesson from 2016, but it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the media helped Trump on both occasions.
Then, last week, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein shared one of the hacked documents on his Substack newsletter — a Trump campaign dossier on all the embarrassing things that JD Vance had said about Trump over the years.
Klippenstein tried to share his newsletter item on Twitter and got blocked and banned. I posted a workaround and got locked out of my account until I deleted the offending post. Meta has been blocking anyone’s attempts to post a link as well, though they haven’t caught up with my Threads post yet.
In any event, you can download the dossier from Klippenstein’s newsletter. I haven’t read it, but I have paged through the table of contents, and it looks highly entertaining though not especially new. (“Vance Wrote That He ‘Loathed’ Trump’s ‘Obvious Personal Character Flaws,’” p. 76).
I assume Tim Walz is boning up ahead of Tuesday’s vice presidential debate.
Mark Zuckerberg.. Photo (cc) 2016 by Alessio Jacona
Mark Zuckerberg has regrets. In a letter to U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan, the right-wing Republican chair of the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerman said he never should have allowed the Biden administration to pressure Meta into removing misinformation and disinformation about COVID-19, because we all would have been so much better off if we could more readily access conspiracy theories about the hazards of masking and the benefits of horse tranquilizer.
“I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any administration in either direction — and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again,” Zuckerberg wrote. The Wall Street Journal’s Siobhan Hughes (free link) reports on Zuckerberg’s letter.
It’s interesting that Zuckerberg decided to dive into the free speech snake pit this week. It’s also not surprising that Republicans, who have been on a book-banning spree at schools nationwide, are propping up old facts as if they were new revelations in their ongoing quest to blame Democrats for censorship. It’s election season, and questioning reality is part of the fun.
As we enter the final two months before the election, there are fewer guardrails for misinformation in place on major social media platforms, and writing a letter about the Biden administration and censorship, Zuckerberg seems to be throwing Republicans a political grenade, something that can fire up the base and use to get mad about Democrats. In reality, though, Zuckerberg is probably just trying to keep his company out of more hot water and to continue revamping his own public image.
Zuckerberg’s abject obsequiousness comes at an interesting time. Ever since Elon Musk bought Twitter in the late 2022, Zuckerberg has tried to come across as the good guy, launching Threads to compete with Twitter and marketing it as the nice alternative to the dark forces of neo-Nazism and racism that Musk has indulged in and has promoted himself.
Now comes a reminder, as if one were needed, that it’s probably not a good idea to choose your social media platform on the basis of which billionaire owner is less evil. Is Musk worse? On balance, yes. But Zuckerberg is the sort of mogul who won’t spend one cent on improving trust and safety if it means fewer profits. And lest we forget, his track record includes passively allowing Facebook’s algorithms to promote atrocities in Myanmar against the Rohingya people, as documented by Amnesty International.
Zuckerberg’s letter also expressed regret for temporarily demoting a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop in the closing days of the 2020 presidential campaign, which has become a crusade on the Trumpist right. But though it’s become an article of faith that the laptop was later authenticated, that’s not entirely true. It took a year and a half of hard work for The Washington Post to authenticate some of the emails on the laptop’s hard drive, and most of them remain unverified. Moreover, none of the verified emails tied Hunter’s business dealings to his father, President Biden.
Finally, Zuckerberg promised not to help with local election infrastructure anymore because “some people believe this work benefited one party over the other,” even though Zuckerberg himself said the data he’s seen shows that’s not true. So score another win for what Hillary Clinton once accurately called the “vast right-wing conspiracy.”
Earlier this summer, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a claim that the Biden administration’s pressure campaign to convince social media companies that they should remove certain content was a violation of the First Amendment, which was surely a relief to every elected official who’s ever picked up the phone and yelled at a reporter.
But it looks like the right is having its way regardless given that what is by far the largest and most influential tech platform — the operator of Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp — has now caved.
Mark Zuckerberg, defender of the algorithm. Photo (cc) 2016 by Alessio Jacona.
Imagine that you could log onto Facebook and not be exposed to that infernal, endlessly scrolling News Feed. Imagine, instead, that you could visit your friends and groups as you wished, without any algorithms to determine what you get exposed to. That’s what Facebook was like in the early days — and it’s what it could be like again if a lawsuit filed by longtime internet activist and researcher Ethan Zuckerman succeeds.
Zuckerman has developed a tool called Unfollow Everything 2.0, which would allow users to unfollow their friends, groups and pages. This wouldn’t change who you’re friends with, which means that you’d have no problem checking in with them manually; you can, of course, do that now as well. No longer, though, would everything be served up to you automatically, non-chronologically and bogged down with a ton of crap you didn’t ask for.
So why is Zuckerman suing? Because, several years ago, a Brit named Louis Barclay developed the original Unfollow Everything. Mark Zuckerberg and company threatened to sue him if he didn’t take it down and permanently threw him off Facebook and Instagram. Barclay wrote about his experience on Slate:
I still remember the feeling of unfollowing everything for the first time. It was near-miraculous. I had lost nothing, since I could still see my favorite friends and groups by going to them directly. But I had gained a staggering amount of control. I was no longer tempted to scroll down an infinite feed of content. The time I spent on Facebook decreased dramatically. Overnight, my Facebook addiction became manageable.
Zuckerman is claiming that Section 230, a federal law that’s normally used to protect internet publishers like Meta from legal liability with regard to the content their users post, also protects developers of third-party tools such as Unfollow Everything.
“I’m suing Facebook to make it better,” Zuckerman, an associate professor at UMass Amherst, said in a press release. “The major social media companies have too much control over what content their users see and don’t see. We’re bringing this lawsuit to give people more control over their social media experience and data and to expand knowledge about how platforms shape public discourse.”
Zuckerman is being represented by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.
• Catch and kill. The National Enquirer’s practice of paying for stories and of deep-sixing articles in order to gain power and influence over someone — known as “catch and kill” — didn’t start with former Enquirer owner David Pecker. Nor was Donald Trump the first alleged beneficiary. I recommend “Scandalous,” a 2019 documentary about the Enquirer that is revealing and highly entertaining. Both Bob Hope and Bill Cosby were caught dead to rights in tawdry sexual affairs, and the Enquirer killed stories about those affairs in order to force them to cooperative in cheery feature stories. Pecker’s innovation was to politicize the practice.
• Facebook and news. Back when I was reporting my 2018 book, “The Return of the Moguls,” news organizations desperately sought to use Facebook as a way of distributing their journalism. News publishers liked to talk about “the barbell,” by which they would attract readers on Facebook (one end of the barbell) and try to get them to migrate to their own digital products (the other end of the barbell), where, it was hoped, they would become paying subscribers.
In the years since, Meta executives have decided news just isn’t worth it and have throttled journalism on Facebook and other products, including Threads and Instagram. How bad is it? The Washington Post has conducted a data analysis (free link) showing that “the 25 most-cited news organizations in the United States lost 75 percent of their total user engagement on Facebook” between the first quarter of 2022 and the first quarter of 2024. It’s further evidence that news organizations’ business models shouldn’t be dependent on giant corporations with their own agendas.
• The WSJ will miss Murdoch. Axel Springer, the right-wing German media conglomerate that took over Politico in 2021, has its sights set on The Wall Street Journal, according to Ben Smith of Semafor. Rupert Murdoch, through his control of the Fox News Channel and other outlets on three continents, may be the most malignant media magnate on the planet. But he’s been a surprisingly good steward of the Journal, which after 17 years of his ownership remains one of our great newspapers. At 93, he won’t be in charge too much longer. And here’s a quote from Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner that you might enjoy: “I’m all for climate change. We shouldn’t fight climate change but adjust to it.”
I’ll grant you that’s something you might see on the Journal’s editorial page even now. Murdoch, though, has been better about not letting that bleed into the news pages than Axel Springer might be.
New Hampshire Statehouse in Concord. Photo (cc) 2012 by AlexiusHoratius
The Boston Globe published a story Friday about a New Hampshire state representative named Jonathan Stone, an ex-police officer who — according to recently released records that he tried to keep secret — “spoke of killing police and raping the chief’s wife and children.”
As the Globe notes, the story was broken on April 5 by Damien Fisher of InDepthNH, a nonprofit news organization that covers politics and public policy in the Granite State. Fisher’s story begins:
Republican Rep. Jon Stone’s New Hampshire law enforcement career ended when he threatened to kill fellow police officers in a shooting spree, and murder his chief after raping the chief’s wife and children, all while he was already under scrutiny for his inappropriate relationship with a teen girl, according to the internal investigation reports finally released this week.
Yikes. Fisher writes that he first filed a right-to-know request in 2020, and that the records were ordered released last month by New Hampshire’s Supreme Court. InDepthNH executive editor and founder Nancy West was a guest on our “What Works” podcast in November 2022.
In Ohio, DIY pink slime
Jack Brewster of NewsGuard, a project that tracks the rise of pink slime news sites, has written an essay for The Wall Street Journal (free link) that is at turns harrowing and hilarious. Spending just $105, he put together a website powered by artificial intelligence that’s designed to look like a local news outlet. Per his specifications, the site, which he called the Buckeye State Press, was designed with a right-wing bias, favoring Republican Senate candidate Bernie Moreno over the Democratic incumbent, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown.
Brewster used an Israeli-based service called Fiverr.com to build the site, which in turn was programmed by a Pakistani freelancer named Huzafa Nawaz. Brewster writes:
From there, all I had to do was answer a few questions about what kind of site I was looking for and the topics I wanted the site’s articles to cover. The domain and site hosting added an extra $25 to the total. The entire AI content farm cost me just $105, and I literally have to do nothing to operate it. It runs itself, auto-publishing dozens of articles a day based on the instructions that I gave to it.
I’ve been following developments in pink slime off and on for the past decade, and what I’ve found is that they are pretty inept. That proved to be the case with Brewster’s experiment as well — at one point his site hallucinated Brown’s attendance at a local fig festival. At some point, though, these projects are going to evolve into effective sources of political propaganda, which we all need to be concerned about.
Google plays hardball in California
As I’ve said repeatedly, I’m skeptical of legislative attempts to force Google and Facebook to pay news organizations for the journalism that they repurpose. If anything, the notion has become more nonsensical over time, as Facebook’s parent company, Meta, has made it clear that it would just as soon eliminate news content on platforms like Facebook and Threads.
Google is a different matter, but no less complicated. News publishers want money from Google, but at the same time exactly none of them add the necessary code to their sites which would make them invisible to Google, because they’re dependent on traffic from the giant search engine, too.
Still, it’s hard not to be outraged by Google’s latest tactic. According to Jeremy B. White of Politico, Google is blocking access to some local news content in parts of California as it fights against state legislation that would force them to pay news organizations. White writes:
“We have long said that this is the wrong approach to supporting journalism,” Google’s vice president for global news partnerships, Jaffer Zaidi, said in a Friday blog post. Zaidi warned the bill could “result in significant changes to the services we can offer Californians and the traffic we can provide to California publishers.”
Well, I guess so. These are the tactics of a thug, and yet another sign that the tech giants have amassed way too much power.
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.
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.”
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.
