Media Bits and Bytes – Anti-Social Media Edition

Media con; Filtering news in China; The net over Africa; FCC under the rabid right; Fight for net neutrality; Fallon on hard times; Screwed at the border

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Beyond Retaliation, Donald Trump's Media Ban a Clever Strategy to Discredit Adversarial Press

By Ananya Srivastava
February 26, 2017
Firstpost

Trump’s core support base seems to be enjoying the Trump-vs-media narrative. The average Trump supporter has shown in the past too that they trust their president over the media, as reported in The New York Times. Plus, discrediting the media seems to be the best strategy when you have an increasingly adversarial reportage to deal with. It is far easier for Trump to cast doubt on an adversarial media than rebutting each and every allegation levelled by it.
Moreover, discrediting the mainstream media will allow the Trump administration to circumvent a hostile media. Leaders in other democracies too have used talk-in shows, much like Prime Minister Modi’s Mann ki Baat, where a drab monologue is used to convey the establishment’s side of the story directly to the people. No uncomfortable questions asked, no explanations sought. Period.

Baidu’s New AI Wants to Filter Your News Based on Quality

By David Axe
February 25, 2017
Motherboard

Engineers at China's biggest search-engine company want to help you decide what news you read. Yuanqing Lin and Shiqi Zhao and their teams at Baidu, headquartered at a sprawling campus in Beijing, are developing a suite of algorithms—they don't hesitate to refer to them as "artificial intelligence"—that they hope will be able to instantly judge the quality and popularity of web content. The program then prioritizes that content in search results and social media feeds.
During a recent visit to Baidu's Beijing facilities, the engineers admitted that they don't know how to teach the AI to separate poorly written but unpopular real news from popular, well-written fake news. The newsreading AI, which still might be a few years from completion, is supposed to do two things. First, decide whether a bit of content is good. "We want to distinguish between good and bad and not recommend bad to users," Shiqi told me.
But he admitted that good and bad can mean different things to different users.

Social Media Has Become the Media in Africa

By Yinka Adegoke
February 26, 2017
Quartz

Five years ago, it would have difficult to anticipate the importance of social media in Africa as a key communications tool with tools like WhatsApp, Viber and more recently WeChat. For some Africans, the newsgroups within WhatsApp alone have become a primary source of news and entertainment.
Like elsewhere, Facebook and Twitter have also been important for sharing news and local information. But in countries where the press has been weakened or compromised, having outlets to share news has been more important than ever. Local newspapers do great work across the continent, but they also need social media to reach as many readers as possible, particularly younger ones.

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Think the Internet Is Polarized? Just Look at the FCC These Days

By Klint Finley
February 26, 2017
Wired

“Trump’s FCC Pick Quickly Targets Net Neutrality Rules,” the New York Times declared. “FCC blocks 9 companies from providing low-income internet access,” CNN reported. Mignon Clyburn, the only remaining Democratic commissioner at the FCC, published sharp rebukes to the moves, complaining that her colleagues had acted “without a shred of explanation.”
Of particular concern were a series of FCC decisions made after the election last year allowing nine companies to participate in the government’s Lifeline program that subsidizes phone and internet service for low income families. At first, Ajit Pai, President Trump’s pick to lead the agency, offered no explanation for reversing those decisions. But by the following Tuesday, widespread criticism forced him to publish a lengthy explanation for a move that seemed to fly in the face of his stated objective of closing the digital divide.

Wolverton: Here’s How to Defend Net Neutrality

By Troy Wolverton
February 17, 2017
San Jose Mercury News

Activists working on the issue have numerous suggestions. But they all boil down to this: Make your voice heard. Hard as it may be to believe sometimes, policymakers do actually listen to the public.
“The short answer is to raise hell,” said Craig Aaron, CEO of Free Press, a consumer advocacy group that helped champion the net neutrality rules.
That’s how net neutrality was saved before. Millions of everyday citizens made their voices heard, and the FCC responded.

Jimmy Fallon Never Recovered From His Disastrous Trump Interview

By Maxwell Strachan
February 23, 2017
Huffington Post

In September, back when President Donald Trump was still just the Republican presidential nominee, Jimmy Fallon invited him to appear on “The Tonight Show” for some fun and games.
Rather than confront Trump about his decision to build a campaign on xenophobic promises, Fallon went the other way, tossing him softball questions about coins and laughing uproariously at Trump’s joke about hamburgers. He even ruffled Trump’s hair.
Fallon’s interview, in many people’s eyes, was not just embarrassing, but dangerous, normalizing the views of a seemingly unstable man who was threatening the central tenets of the country, all in exchange for a few cheap laughs and maybe a slight ratings bump.

We Already Screen Cell Phones at The Border, Will Social Media Be Any Different?

By Kalev Leetaru
January 29, 2017
Forbes

CNN is reporting that the White House may be taking tentative steps to explore what it would take to scan social media accounts and cell phone contacts of all visitors to the United States, making “social media screening” a part of the screening process to enter the country. Lost in all of the ensuing furor is that we’ve actually already done this for years, between customs searches and seizures of cell phones and laptops and NSA surveillance of social media – looking across the state of our surveillance world, what might we expect from the future of digital adjudication?