Media Bits and Bytes – Truth or Consequences Edition

How the right commandeers Google; Facebook censorship by algorithm; PropOrNot 1 and 2; Media Trumped; #Trumpgrets

Portside
Printer friendly  


Google, Democracy and the Truth about Internet Search

By Carole Cadwalladr
December 4, 2016
The Guardian

The technology that was supposed to set us free may well have helped Trump to power, or covertly helped swing votes for Brexit. It has created a vast network of propaganda that has encroached like a cancer across the entire internet. This is a technology that has enabled the likes of Cambridge Analytica to create political messages uniquely tailored to you. They understand your emotional responses and how to trigger them. They know your likes, dislikes, where you live, what you eat, what makes you laugh, what makes you cry.
Journalism is failing in the face of such change and is only going to fail further. New platforms have put a bomb under the financial model – advertising – resources are shrinking, traffic is increasingly dependent on them, and publishers have no access, no insight at all, into what these platforms are doing in their headquarters, their labs. And now they are moving beyond the digital world into the physical. The next frontiers are healthcare, transportation, energy. And just as Google is a near-monopoly for search, its ambition to own and control the physical infrastructure of our lives is what’s coming next. It already owns our data and with it our identity. What will it mean when it moves into all the other areas of our lives?
 

Secret Trade Proposal Would Give Facebook Free Reign to Censor by Algorithm

By Joshua Kopstein
November 27, 2016
Motherboard

Facebook has long drawn ire over its tendency to censor users’ posts based on its opaque standards. But under leaked proposals from a controversial European trade deal, the social network and other online services could be granted legal immunity when censoring any content, as long as it’s deemed “harmful or objectionable.”
The measure is one of several internet-related proposals being advanced by the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA), according to a leaked section of the agreement published by Greenpeace and the German digital rights blog Netzpolitik. The draft proposal, which is dated September 16, 2013, effectively guarantees online services’ ability to censor such content in Europe without needing to accept any legal liability or public accountability—whether that curation is done by a human or an algorithm.
Digital rights advocates warn the TiSA agreement could codify this as a form of “privatized censorship,” further enabling companies to shut down legal challenges over content that gets removed from their platforms.

‘The Washington Post’ Promotes a McCarthyite Blacklist

By James Carden
November 28, 2016
The Nation
According to the Washington Post’s Craig Timberg, a group which goes by the moniker PropOrNot, a “nonpartisan collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds” has identified “more than 200 websites as routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season, with combined audiences of at least 15 million Americans.”
This is a group that has assembled a media blacklist and smeared working journalists as agents of the Kremlin, all the while cravenly wrapping itself in a cloak of anonymity.
 

If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary.

(One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.)

Why Are Media Outlets Still Citing Discredited ‘Fake News’ Blacklist?

By Adam Johnson
December 1, 2016
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting

Almost everyone outside of  the Washington Post who critically examined the list concluded it was at best shoddy and ill-considered, and at worst a deliberate attempt to encourage a chilling effect on Russia-related reporting. That a group of Cold Warrior hacks would publish such a blacklist is not a surprise; that one of the most established names in American news would uncritically parrot it was. Its reporting, writing-up and referencing is a prime example of how fake real news on real fake news spreads without question.
USA Today (11/25/16), Gizmodo (11/25/16), PBS (11/25/16), The Daily Beast (11/25/16), Slate (11/25/16), AP (11/25/16) The Verge (11/25/16) and NPR (11/25/16) all uncritically wrote up the Post’s most incendiary claims with little or minimal pushback. Gizmodo was so giddy its original headline had to be changed from “Research Confirms That Russia Played a Major Role in Spreading Fake News” to “Research Suggests That Russia Played a Major Role in Spreading Fake News,” presumably after some polite commenters pointed out that the research “confirmed” nothing of the sort.
 

The Media's Big Trump Conundrum

By Shawn Rhea  
November 29, 2016
Colorlines

News organizations are soul searching about how to accurately cover the Trump Administration, its policies and its supporters. Many are torn between reporting through the traditional, uncritical lens that supposedly leads to balanced work and shining an unsparing light on Trump's regressive rhetoric and policies. Embracing a more critical style of reporting will be a significant pivot for news outfits that gave Trump and his supporters a lot of unedited air time and ink with little historical or present-day context during the election.
Terminology is just one issue challenging such newsrooms. Trump has made it clear that he will use tactics such as limiting press access to the White House and suing reporters for libel to control the narrative. During the campaign, he famously banned outlets such as The Washington Post, Politico and The Huffington Post from covering his events. Recently, he held a closed-door convening with executives and reporters from top outlets for the purpose of castigating them.

#Trumpgrets Website Compiles Regretful Trump Voters’ Lamentations for Your Reading Pleasure

By David Ferguson
December 2, 2016
Raw Story

If you need an invigorating dose of pleasure at the pain and misfortune of others, we at Raw Story’s Voters Remorse desk would like to direct you to #Trumpgrets, a Tumblr site devoted to compiling the delicious salty tears of people who voted for President-elect Donald Trump and already regret it.
Yes, the former reality TV star has not even been voted into office by the Electoral College and already some of his supporters are angry that he’s backing off his more extreme campaign promises like repealing Obamacare on his first day in office, building a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico and rounding up undocumented workers and sending them to their home countries.
A corresponding Twitter campaign has sprung up called #Trumpgrets.