Smartphone news is creating a generation of better connected but less well informed citizens, and replacing humans with algorithms doesn't always pay off

Friday, September 02, 2016      Future Media Lab.       0

Continuing with our bi-weekly news roundup, George Sims shares the news that caught his eye over the last two weeks. The news round-up is a way for the Future Media Lab. team and members of the Future Media Lab. network to share articles about innovations and developments in the media sector, including references to relevant media policy debates.

Here are George's choices for this week:

Mobile news is creating a better connected generation, albeit a more poorly informed one. How do you consume your news? The smartphone generation has a large part of the population reading the news on their mobile devices. It’s practical, you always have it on you, it makes commuting less boring and it doesn’t take up as much space as a book, magazine or newspaper. But what effect is this new method of ingesting news having on the population’s level of knowledge and information? Recent Harvard Shorenstein fellow Johanna Dunaway has published a paper on the widening knowledge gap between the politically interested and those with less interest in politics, linking it to the increase in mobile news consumption. According to her study, mobile users are less likely to follow links and stay longer on news provider websites than desktop users, and our generation’s fragmented media environment is “eroding the public’s level of information and engagement”.

Facebook replaced its trending editors with a new fully automated trending module last week. According to the Guardian, the team was fired without notice at a meeting with a security guard present, with four weeks’ severance. The move towards automation has so far turned out to be quite a disaster, as the new algorithm has pushed false, misspelled and obscene stories to the top of the trending list, resulting in a picture of a man masturbating with a chicken burger going viral. It would seem that in some cases the human brain can still do the job better than computer algorithms. 

Does free speech apply to terrorists as well? Another freedom vs security debate takes place as Internet giants Facebook, Google and Twitter stand accused by UK lawmakers of not doing enough to combat extremist propaganda by the likes of ISIS and Al Qaida. It is a well-known fact that terrorist organisations use these digital media platforms for gaining support and recruiting, and the billion-dollar companies have been accused of not doing enough to curtail their online activity. While the big three have recently launched a number of initiatives such as targeted videos, counter-messaging campaigns and large-scale account deleting in order to curtail extremist narratives, some believe that these efforts do not live up to the responsibility of the kings of the internet.

The European Commission has announced a soon-to-be published draft law on data privacy that should bring the privacy and security policies of internet messaging to a similar level as those applied to text messages and phone calls. The final legal text, which is expected to be published around the end of 2016, will differ from the US version in matters of security vs. Privacy. However, complaints of “too many conflicting regulations”, “ inconsistent loopholes” and outdated methods have been mentioned a number of times.

The importance of media commentary: The objective journalist or media outlet has not yet been invented, and opinions have always had a strong influence over the way in which facts are presented and interpreted. While some claim that this phenomenon is a recent one, or that it has been accentuated by the rise of social media, The Guardian’s Roy Greenslade argues that it is an age-old challenge that highlights the importance and the role of media commentary: “to make transparent to as wide an audience as possible, as often as possible, the underlying messages of so-called facts.”

“Money talks. Sometimes louder than speech.”  Rem Rieder, USA Today

Gawker, the online publication that made it it’s mission to reveal the unsavoury private and business scandals of the rich, powerful and famous, has been forced into bankruptcy by a compensation lawsuit last week. The lawsuit was financed by billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel, whose lawyers have been working on suing Gawker since the 2007 article: “Peter Thiel is totally gay, people”. The fact that a rich individual can shut down a publishing company via a proxy lawsuit, silencing a voice of radical transparency out of pure personal revenge, is disturbing to say the least. In the words of Nick Denton, Gawker’s founder:

“And so Gawker’s demise turns out to be the ultimate Gawker story. It shows how things work.”

Is this the last-man-standing period of digital media ownership? In a speech at the Edinburgh International Television Festival last week, Vice Media group co-founder Shane Smith predicted an enormous consolidation of the digital media market for 2017. This summer, Verizon bought Yahoo for USD 4.83 billion in order to merge it with AOL, while Gawker was forced to shut down and sold to Univision for 135 million. Rumours that Apple may be interested in buying Netflix and that Disney still has a keen eye on Buzzfeed confirm Smith’s narrative in the fast-moving and uncertain world of digital media. The Facebook/Google duopoly needs to be challenged, as it has sunk the price of advertisement while at the same time increasing traffic. The only move that could shake this duopoly at the moment would be for Verizon to buy Twitter, according to Bank of America’s Lou Paskalis.

CNN launched a drone division this month. The use of drones for journalistic purposes is not an entirely novel idea, but CNN is the first major news organization to assign a specialist team uniquely dedicated to unmanned aerial imagery and news gathering. This move comes following the release of the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) long-awaited “Guidelines for the operation and certification of Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems”, providing news gathering agencies with a framework within which it is considered safe and ethical to use drones for information gathering within a civilian context.