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Terms of Disservice. Dipayan Ghosh
Читать онлайн.Название Terms of Disservice
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780815737667
Автор произведения Dipayan Ghosh
Издательство Ingram
The Diminishment of the Fourth Estate
The prevailing digital platforms—especially those operated by Facebook and Google—have unconditionally diminished the importance of the organizations and individuals that have traditionally reported the news. Journalism today is floundering in the United States and in many other localities around the world where social media applications have become popular.
Breaking down the meaning of and implications surrounding journalism’s demise is critical. Many news organizations have been put in financially precarious positions in recent years, especially local print newspapers large and small, including the Tampa Bay Tribune, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and others that once enjoyed circulations in the hundreds of thousands.15 This has given rise to “news deserts,” pockets of the country that lack access to a print publication and therefore a medium by which to get news.16 Further, it has meant that the industry of journalism has contracted; beyond the job consequences of the aforementioned shutdowns, many organizations that remain in service to their constituencies have nevertheless had to cut staff. As Jon Allsop has discussed, 2018 was an especially bad year for the aggregate job count in journalism.17 Meanwhile, the only traditional news organizations that remain healthy to at least some apparent extent—like the New York Times and Washington Post—walked into the digital age with tremendously powerful brand names that extend their reach well beyond their relative localities. The growing number of industry barons like Jeff Bezos, Laurene Powell Jobs, and Marc Benioff buying up famous news organizations that have traditionally functioned as self-sustaining businesses does not bode well either.
Of course, we could interpret the decline in the number of traditional news organizations as a simple effect of fluid American capitalism at work, an instance of Schumpeter’s “perennial gale” of creative destruction featuring a cycle of innovation and disruption.18 As society has evolved and more and more people have gravitated from traditional news media to social media and other digital platforms to read current news, traditional news media has inevitably struggled to attract adequate advertising from marketers to support the sustenance of the business, causing them to contract or even shut down. But such a mass contraction has consequences. As more newsrooms shutter and the people in those that remain wane in number, the practice of journalistic inquiry will increasingly suffer. Fewer trained journalists will be in the field acquiring and investigating the hard facts of the Russian disinformation operations or even the health of local businesses on Main Street. Meanwhile, we as consumers will source our information from digital platforms, which populate our feeds with news and social posts—a circumstance that comes with its own vast set of problems ranging from the economic to the political.
The connections to the actions of Silicon Valley internet firms are not only many but also difficult to discern. Clearly, though, there is a deep-rooted societal problem underlying the predictable transition of ad dollars from traditional news media to digital platforms. As traditional news organizations have declined in numbers and revenue, citizens have collectively relied on the internet for a greater share of news facts—but those facts have been riddled with lies, hatred, and conspiracy theories driven by those who have interests in disseminating such content. Meanwhile, the platform firms have generally been standoffish about the need to regulate content until their backs have been pushed to the wall. They have furthermore been forced into a dispute with the news industry and others over whether they should simply be considered indifferent internet platforms that are not liable for the veracity of the content they spread—a standard that is protected by the now-infamous Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act—or whether they should be considered media outlets like the traditional news industry is and as such be regulated by the federal government.
The fact that digital platforms divide society into population classes for ad targeting purposes and curate content on a personal basis for individual users should suggest the correct answer: their curation of social and news content, alongside their relative centrality in the modern information ecosystem, will necessitate media-like regulation. Such legislation is already on the table for consideration in Congress.19 Passage, however, is controversial and likely will be drawn out over many long years. In the meantime, we must wait and see if the latest voluntary measures that companies like Google and Facebook have taken will amount to any meaningful change. Both have established well-funded news initiatives that nominally support the interests of journalists (although these projects have been vilified by some experts).20
Terrorism
One of the most terrifying incidents in recent times, once again involving Facebook, took place in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March 2019. Brenton Tarrant, a young Australian man from New South Wales who has been described as a far-right white supremacist, opened fire on the Al Noor Mosque and later the Linwood Islamic Centre.21 Tarrant’s chilling use of Facebook Live to stream his approach to the mosque and what he did inside it incited a global controversy over the use of online video-streaming services, including Facebook Live, LiveLeak, and YouTube, all of which were used to disseminate the shooter’s video. YouTube product manager Neal Mohan noted that the “volumes at which that content was being copied and then re-uploaded to our platform was unprecedented in nature.”22 Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, after copies of the video showed up in her feed well after the fact and despite Facebook’s attempts at content takedowns, took the matter into her own hands, hosting talks with French President Emmanuel Macron to confront the ongoing social media crisis.23 Many attended, including British Prime Minister Theresa May, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, along with Twitter Chief Executive Jack Dorsey, Microsoft President Brad Smith, and Google Senior Vice President Kent Walker. One notable absentee: Mark Zuckerberg.24
Digital Commerce: The Thread Connecting It All
What is the thread that connects these terrible new circumstances? I would put that it is the economic logic—the business model—underlying the consumer internet itself.
Consider this possibility: the commercial nature of Silicon Valley, and more specifically the internet sector, is causing the sociopolitical problems that beset us today. The conjecture is not obvious; applying this lens to the Russian disinformation problem, to take one example of a public harm engendered by the internet, is not trivial. There are nefarious actors—people in the physical world—who push coordinated disinformation into American media markets to trigger harmful political effects. Presumably they, of course, are also to blame.
Industry executives such as Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, accordingly describe such disinformation propagators in clear and aggressive terms. She has noted that “there will always be bad actors, and I don’t want to minimize that, but we are going to do everything we can to find bad actors,” adding further, “we’re not looking at these tradeoffs like ‘oh, it’s going to hurt our business.… People’s trust is the most important thing.”25
Sandberg places the blame for the spread of disinformation on one entity—the set of “bad actors”—and none on her firm. What the company knows too well is that a silent machine sits behind 1 Hacker Way’s shining exterior and—like any other Silicon Valley behemoth—advances solely the long-run profitmaking interests of the company’s owners and investors over any other consideration. And there is an implicit alignment in the commercial goals of Facebook and the persuasive goals of the Russian disinformation operators. Both desire the user’s maximal engagement with the content at hand, and unless the appropriate rules and regulations are set for the platform, the company will promote whatever makes it the most money. The responsibility for the spread of disinformation must be shared by the entities that created it and by the entities that enabled its dissemination. We cannot ignore the economic alignment of their objectives.
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