-
After election media could have a meaningful & needed conversation about how it lost reader trust. Oh we're just blaming Facebook instead?
-
If I'm being generous, the media ceded Facebook power and now complains it isn't being used how they want.
-
But that is way generous, b/c it doesn't take into account how we blocked people out of news w/paywalls & turned over our adspace to fraud.
-
Theses are the perverse incentives of the media's own making. These fake news sites run many of the same ads that appear on real news sites.
-
Those fake news sites make money by running at the top of a pyramid of fake news sites and at the bottom you get Chronotope/735616798209507328
-
Yeah, ad arbitrage. Which generates traffic for legitimate news sites. Facebook may drive traffic to fake news. Who funds it? We the media.
-
The media funds fake news *directly* by buying traffic on content networks like Taboola and indirectly by playing traffic arbitrage games.
-
And then they take the further step of pushing their readers away by shutting down comments and putting up paywalls.
-
Remember, elements of the media have straight up said that they'd rather cut off huge swaths of their readership medium.com/fluxx-studio-notes/the-first-rule-of-pricing-is-you-do-not-talk-about-pricing-1875caa39b89#.dt4x7h839
-
Yeah, that's a newspaper bragging about pushing readership numbers from 22m to around 300,000 for profit. *Where do those readers go?*
-
We don't get to complain about Facebook not having editorial ethics when we sacrificed our own to the gods of ad tech and desperation.
-
So we need to examine how we, media orgs, created an economic ecosystem where fake news is profitable. Oh, but nope, let's talk about FB.
-
I'm sorry. You don't get to spend years digging your own god damn grave and look up & say 'Save us great Silicon Valley!'
-
This is the same exact thinking that got us to here. You don't solve the media's problems by calling on Big Tech to give you a band-aid.
-
Dear media: stop asking other entities to take your power from you. We have so little left now.
-
If Facebook hired 300 editors tomorrow and started fact checking every post... what is even the point of the media anymore?
-
Why not just let Facebook amplify posts about events that their editors have independently verified and read the Real Facts from Real People
-
This sounds stupid and ludicrous... but remember this is basically Twitter's new business plan.
-
"The people's news network" Chronotope/791699891978440704
-
But nah, ask Facebook to take censorship power into its hands and become an authority on truth. The Authoritarian Impulse in Media.
-
Because we have so much proof that Silicon Valley is filled w/trustworthy reasonable people who have the nation's best interests at heart?
-
Beyond all the other problems, asking Facebook to take on more editorial power is equivalent to asking Goldman Sachs to run the SEC.
-
We already know where that goes: huffingtonpost.com/news/goldman-sachs-revolving-door/, mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/economy/article24785017.html
Chronotope’s Twitter Archive—№ 71,508