News Publishers Ask For Monopoly Powers To Fight Back Against Google/Facebook Monopoly

from the if-you-can't-beat-them,-join-them-in-antitrust-violations dept

Cool. Cool. More two wrongs make a right legislation is being routed through the federal government. The first wrong? Facebook and Google have "too much" power, apparently, and they're strangling the life out of news agencies. Allegedly. This would seem to raise antitrust issues, if they're actually big enough to throttle newspapers and other publishers into submission. That's a big if, but why wait until the facts are in to decide? How do you fight a supposed monopoly? By allowing more monopoly, apparently.

Representative David Cicilline (D-Rhode Island) plans to introduce a bill that would exempt publishers from antitrust enforcement so they can negotiate collectively over terms for distributing their content. Cicilline says the bill is designed to level the playing field between publishers and the tech giants, not dictate the outcome. Without an exemption, collective action by publishers could run afoul of antitrust laws around colluding over price or refusal to deal with competitors.

Oddly enough, several media companies are onboard with this hot monopoly-on-monopoly action. The News Media Alliance -- representing 2,000 newspapers across the US and Canada -- thinks it doesn't have enough leverage to negotiate with social media companies. So, it wants to be allowed to break the law to make things more fair. It seems that if the problem is a social media/search engine monopoly, then legislators might want to have a word with the monopolists before allowing another set of media companies to collude to make the internet a shitty place to find news.

To make this plea for government-blessed collusion, the head of the NMA, David Chavern, has decided to belittle the internet and the people who use it.

[C]havern believes the news business warrants intervention because of its role in a healthy democracy. “The republic is not going to suffer terribly if we have bad cat video or even bad movies or bad TV. The republic will suffer if we have bad journalism,” he says, pointing to data from Pew that shows newspaper advertising fell by $4 billion from 2014 to 2016, even though web traffic for the top U.S. newspapers grew 42 percent during the same time period.

This is some prime elitist claptrap. The internet can be used for more than one thing. People who watch cat videos also read local reporting. People who enjoy bad TV also enjoy in-depth journalism. None of this is mutually exclusive and none of this has anything to do with Google or Facebook or media companies seeking permission to get the band back together and engage in monopolistic behavior. If you're so dead set on "saving the republic," why is your first move to punch holes in antitrust laws? Are you that obtuse? Do you think that hole won't be made wider by competitors for consumers' attention, resulting in even less traffic and ad revenue for news publishers?

While I understand the desire to "level" the playing field, the mechanism is completely wrong. Many, many publishers have complained about Facebook and Google destroying them but none have ever put their remaining money where their mouth is and walked away from whatever these tech companies have offered. Maybe they feel a bad deal is better than no deal at all. Or maybe they actually recognize these companies drive traffic to their sites -- traffic they wouldn't have otherwise.

At the bottom of this is a demand for money. Publishers want Google and Facebook to pay (more) for sending them traffic. Since they can't produce enough leverage to sell this worthless bill of goods, they want the government to give them a pass on antitrust charges until they get the payout they want. This won't work out the way they want it to and it will create a hole in antitrust laws others will exploit, all in the name of "fairness."

Filed Under: antitrust, competition, david cicilline, internet platforms, journalism, monopolies, news
Companies: facebook, google, news media alliance

County Gov't Tries To Dodge Liability In Jailhouse Deaths By Intimidating The Journalist Who Exposed Them

from the step-aside,-Constitution! dept

To keep itself from being held liable for inmate deaths, San Diego County (CA) has decided to target the journalist who exposed them. Kelly Davis, along with the EFF's Dave Maass, used public records requests and investigative journalism to detail 60 deaths in the county's five jails, which occurred over the course of five years. The death rate in San Diego jails was consistently higher than those of comparably-sized systems. In fact, the death rate was higher than that of the 10 largest jail systems in the country. Documents showed almost a third of those were preventable.

But when a lawsuit was filed by the wife of an inmate who died in a San Diego County jail, the county argued there was no negligence. The presiding judge disagreed, citing Davis and Maass' journalism.

The Marine’s widow is suing the county, claiming the jail system didn’t protect Nesmith from himself despite multiple warning signs. A judge allowed the case to go forward, noting that news coverage could “plausibly” have given the county a heads-up of “a pattern of deliberate indifference” to suicidal inmates.

Ok, if that's the way you want to play this, said the county in its next filing. If these reports should have given us heads up on negligence in county jails, let's see if we can't dispute the accuracy of the reports. The county has asked the judge to force Kelly Davis to turn over everything she has on jail deaths, including documents and interviews that haven't been published.

Randy Dotinga of the Voice of San Diego explains what the county is really trying to do with this discovery demand:

Let’s dig beyond the legalese into what the county is actually saying here:

So you’re suggesting we should have known that we had a big problem with jail suicides because of those “60 Dead Inmates” headlines and done something? Maybe those stories were wrong, and we didn’t need to know about a problem we didn’t actually have! We can’t be bothered to run the numbers ourselves, so we’ll force the reporter to do it for us.

This part is unsaid: This will also suck up hours of depositions and cost everyone a bundle. Luckily, we’re taxpayer-funded! And hey, we’ll learn who squealed to the reporter too. Bonus!

This is an obvious attempt to intimidate a journalist who exposed misconduct and malfeasance. The county has plenty of previous reporting it could dig into, as well as unfettered access to jail records and jail employees. Instead, it's dragging the journalist to court and attempting to unmask sources. The county is trying to bypass First Amendment protections and the state's journalist shield laws to skirt liability in jailhouse deaths.

Fortunately, Davis has pro bono representation pushing back against the county's demands. It appears the county didn't think the journalist would stand up for her rights. So, it's changed its arguments. Instead of bypassing Constitutional protections, the government is hoping to get every damning piece of journalism booted from the ongoing civil rights lawsuit. The new "deal" proposed by the county would be to rescind its demands for sources and source material from Davis if the plaintiff agrees to never bring up Davis' reporting during the lawsuit. One way or another, the county is hoping to bury inconvenient facts. The widow bringing the lawsuit has refused this deal, meaning the reporting is still in play and the demand for Davis to reveal everything she's collected still an ongoing concern.

For now, Davis won't have to turn over anything. As Voice of San Diego reports, the judge has ruled against the county's request. The county may appeals this order, but for now, Davis won't have to produce documents or testify.

As Dotinga points out, this is nothing more than intimidation from government reps who think they can push their constituents around.

We’ve seen several recent cases of overreach by lawyers who work for taxpayers. The city attorney’s office slut-shamed a victim of a predatory cop and held an extensive jail term over the head of a man who protested a bank by writing slogans in chalk on a sidewalk. The district attorney’s office, meanwhile, targeted a rapper over his lyrics and tried to send a group of men to jail for having links to a gang involved in a fatal shooting.

This is how San Diego is handling problems with its law enforcement officers. It's punishing citizens for speaking up, protesting, engaging in journalism, or being the victims of sexual assault by people in positions of power. Every single aspect of this is shameful, but having a sense of shame means admitting the county has a problem (well, several of them). County reps aren't paid to admit fault. But they shouldn't be collecting paychecks for violating the US Constitution and state law, either.

Filed Under: blame, dave maass, jailhouse deaths, journalism, kelly davis, san diego

Salon Offers To Remove Ads If Visitors Help Mine Cryptocurrency

from the just-renting dept

As we've been discussing, the rise of stealth cryptocurrency miners embedded on websites has become a notable problem. In some instances, websites are being hacked and embedded with stealth cryptocurrency miners that quickly gobble up visitors' CPU cycles without their knowledge. That's what happened to Showtime recently when two different domains were found to be utilizing the Coinhive miner to hijack visitor broswers without users being informed. Recent reports indicate that thousands of government websites have also been hijacked and repurposed in this fashion via malware.

But numerous websites are also now exploring such miners voluntarily as an alternative revenue stream. One major problem however: many aren't telling site visitors this is even happening. And since some implementations of such miners can hijack massive amounts of CPU processing power while sipping a non-insubstantial amount of electricity, that's a problem.

The Pirate Bay for example was forced to stop using visitor CPUs and browsers to mine Monero last fall after Reddit users complained the miner was slowing down their PCs and eating up 80% of their CPU cycles. The website stated that it was simply exploring new revenue streams to keep the website afloat:

"As you may have noticed we are testing a Monero javascript miner. This is only a test. We really want to get rid of all the ads. But we also need enough money to keep the site running."

This week Salon joined the fun, informing users that they'd be happy to suppress advertisements if site visitors are willing to help mine cryptocurrency:

Creative exploration of alternative revenue streams is obviously necessary, and there's numerous examples where site-driven cryptocurrency miners could be used to help bolster scientific research. Salon pretty clearly understands this decision is controversial, offering up an entire website explaining how making money from journalism is hard, and the company needed to explore some new, creative solutions in order to stay afloat:

"Salon is instructing your processor to run calculations. Think of it like borrowing your calculator for a few minutes to figure out the answer to math problems, then giving it back when you leave the site. We automatically detect your current processing usage and assign a portion of what you are not using to this process. Should you begin a process that requires more of your computer’s resources, we automatically reduce the amount we are using for calculations."

That said, security researchers have similarly warned that this is a very slippery slope, and for every website that's being transparent about the process and respectful of the possible impact on computer performance, there're countless others who quite obviously won't give much of a damn about either. These are, after all, the same websites that are now engaging in ham fisted and annoying ad blocker blocking, frequently oblivious to how their own obnoxious ad decisions drove the rise of ad blockers in the first place.

As Malwarebytes researchers recently noted, there's no limit of websites that are already pushing their luck on this front:

"The question at this point is: How far can publishers push the limits towards a really bad user experience? You may be surprised that for many, this is not really a problem at all and that double dipping is, in fact, a fairly common practice...publishers ought to be more transparent with their audience because no-one likes unannounced guests. Unfortunately, there will always be publishers that care very little about what kind of traffic they push, so long as it generates good revenues; for those, cryptominers are just an added income to their existing advertising portfolio."

If implemented with respect for the end user and transparency, such miners may not be a bad thing. But bad actors could very quickly create an environment where users feel they're being accosted by sites that don't respect either, resulting in another layer of cat and mouse gamesmanship between sites publishers and readers. So while there's certainly potential here, escalating an already adversarial relationship in the adblocker era isn't likely to excite readers, forge community, or save journalism anytime soon.

Filed Under: business models, cryptocurrency, journalism, mining, salon, transparency
Companies: salon

An English-Language, Algorithmically-Personalized News Aggregator, Based In China -- What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

from the no-social-graph-required dept

Techdirt has been exploring the important questions raised by so-called "fake news" for some time. A new player in the field of news aggregation brings with it some novel issues. It's called TopBuzz, and it comes from the Chinese company Toutiao, whose rapid rise is placing it alongside the country's more familiar "BAT" Internet giants -- Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent. It's currently expanding its portfolio in the West: recently it bought the popular social video app Musical.ly for about $800 million:

Toutiao aggregates news and videos from hundreds of media outlets and has become one of the world's largest news services in the span of five years. Its parent company [Bytedance] was valued at more than $20 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter, on par with Elon Musk's SpaceX. Started by Zhang Yiming, it's on track to pull in about $2.5 billion in revenue this year, largely from advertising.

An in-depth analysis of the company on Ycombinator's site explains what makes this aggregator so successful, and why it's unlike other social networks offering customized newsfeeds based on what your friends are reading:

Toutiao, one of the flagship products of Bytedance, may be the largest app you’ve never heard of -- it's like every news feed you read, YouTube, and TechMeme in one. Over 120M people in China use it each day. Yet what's most interesting about Toutiao isn't that people consume such varied content all in one place... it's how Toutiao serves it up. Without any explicit user inputs, social graph, or product purchase history to rely on, Toutiao offers a personalized, high quality-content feed for each user that is powered by machine and deep learning algorithms.

However, as people are coming to appreciate, over-dependence on algorithmic personalization can lead to a rapid proliferation of "fake news" stories. A post about TopBuzz on the Technode site suggests this could be a problem for the Chinese service:

What's been my experience? Well, simply put, it's been a consistent and reliable multi-course meal of just about every variety of fake news.

The post goes on to list some of the choice stories that TopBuzz's AI thought were worth serving up:

Roy Moore Sweeps Alabama Election to Win Senate Seat

Yoko Ono: "I Had An Affair With Hillary Clinton in the '70s"

John McCain's Legacy is DEMOLISHED Overnight As Alarming Scandals Leak

Julia Roberts Claims 'Michelle Obama Isn't Fit To Clean Melania's Toilet'

The post notes that Bytedance is aware of the problem of blatantly false stories in its feeds, and the company claims to be using both its artificial intelligence tools as well as user reports to weed them out. It says that "when the system identifies any fake content that has been posted on its platform, it will notify all who have read it that they had read something fake." But:

this is far from my experience with TopBuzz. Although I receive news that is verifiably fake on a near-daily basis, often in the form of push notifications, I have never once received a notification from the app informing me that Roy Moore is in fact not the new junior senator from Alabama, or that Hillary Clinton was actually not Yoko Ono's sidepiece when she was married to John Lennon.

The use of highly-automated systems, running on server farms in China, represents new challenges beyond those encountered so far with Facebook and similar social media, where context and curation are being used to an increasing degree to mitigate the potential harm of algorithmic newsfeeds. The fact that a service like TopBuzz is provided by systems outside the control of the US or other Western jurisdictions poses additional problems. As deep-pocketed Chinese Internet companies seek to expand outside their home markets, bringing with them their own approaches and legal frameworks, we can expect these kind of issues to become increasingly thorny. We are also likely to see those same services begin to wrestle with some of the same problems currently being tackled in the West.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: aggregator, ai, china, fake news, journalism, news, toutiao
Companies: bytedance

Rupert Murdoch Admits, Once Again, He Can't Make Money Online -- Begs Facebook To Just Give Him Money

from the that's-not-a-business-model dept

There's no denying that Rupert Murdoch built up quite a media empire over the decades -- but that was almost all entirely focused on newspaper and pay TV. While he's spent the past few decades trying to do stuff on the internet, he has an impressively long list of failures over the years. There are many stories of him buying internet properties (Delphi, MySpace, Photobucket) or starting them himself (iGuide, Fox Interactive, The Daily) and driving them into the ground (or just flopping right out of the gate). While his willingness to embrace the internet early and to try things is to be commended, his regular failures to make his internet ventures successful has pretty clearly soured him on the internet entirely over the years.

Indeed, over the past few years, Murdoch or Murdoch surrogates (frequently News Corp's CEO Robert Thomson) have bashed the internet at every opportunity, no matter how ridiculous. Almost all of these complaints can be summed up simply: big internet companies are making money and News Corp. isn't -- and therefore the problem is with those other companies which should be forced to give News Corp. money.

A few years back, I ended up at a small media conference where Rupert's son James Murdoch spoke at great length about his plans for News Corps' internet business -- and what struck me was that he was almost 100% focused on copying the pay TV model. This wasn't a huge surprise -- I think at the time he was running Sky TV -- but it shocked me that he appeared to think through force of will he could turn the internet into a walled garden a la cable and satellite TV systems. Not surprisingly, Rupert is thinking along similar lines, and earlier this week released a bizarre and silly statement saying Facebook should start paying news sites "carriage fees" a la cable companies:

The time has come to consider a different route. If Facebook wants to recognize ‘trusted’ publishers then it should pay those publishers a carriage fee similar to the model adopted by cable companies. The publishers are obviously enhancing the value and integrity of Facebook through their news and content but are not being adequately rewarded for those services. Carriage payments would have a minor impact on Facebook’s profits but a major impact on the prospects for publishers and journalists.

We've seen this kind of thinking many times before. First the argument was used against Craigslist. Then Google. And now, apparently, Facebook. The short version is "these internet companies are making money, we news companies aren't -- ergo, the successful internet companies should be paying the failing news companies." For someone who claims to be a died-in-the-wool free market capitalism supporter and who insists that socialism is "immoral," I can't help but note that this appears to be Rupert Murdoch asking for successful companies to subsidize his failing companies in the interest of "social value."

Indeed, contrast his begging Facebook for handouts with his pro-capitalism speech from a few years ago. In it, he notes that "to succeed, you have to produce something that other people are willing to pay for." And that's just the thing, Rupert, the market dynamics here say that no one is willing to pay to "carry" your news. Tony Haile, the former CEO of Chartbeat and the founder of a new company Skroll that is working on media business models (and, randomly, who I met at that very same conference where James Murdoch spouted his nonsense) has laid out a pretty clear explanation for why the carriage fee model doesn't make any sense at all on the internet. The market dynamics are totally different -- the leverage and value positions of the players are different, the value to the end users is different and the market barriers to entry are totally different, meaning a totally different competitive market.

Indeed, the internet and Murdoch's reaction to it are truly fascinating, as they strip away The Emperor's New Clothes concerning Murdoch's supposed support of free market capitalism. He claims to be in favor of it when it helps him to accumulate hoards of cash, but as soon as he can't build a successful competitive business, he suddenly resorts to the "immoral" position he supposedly loathes -- demanding that the other successful operations just fork over money to him because he (claims he) provides tremendous social value.

There are, of course, plenty of discussions to be had about media business models -- and the power that companies like Google and Facebook hold. But to merely demand they hand over "carriage fees" just because makes no sense. It's a weak demand from someone who failed in the market and has no desire to truly innovate or compete. It ignores, too, that such a setup would only entrench existing players and harm upstarts and competitors. The whole thing is quite silly -- but also quite incredible for what it truly reveals about Murdoch's actual feelings for a free market when he's on the losing end of one.

Filed Under: business models, cable tv, capitalism, carriage fees, competition, free market, james murdoch, journalism, news, rupert murdoch, socialism, tony haile
Companies: facebook, news corp.

Media Freaks Out About Facebook Changes; Maybe They Shouldn't Have Become So Reliant On Facebook

from the pivot-to-bankruptcy dept

Last week, a large part of the media ecosystem seemed to totally flip out following Facebook's announcement that it was going to effectively de-prioritize news content in favor of content from friends and family. Facebook was pretty direct about how this will decrease traffic to many publishers:

Because space in News Feed is limited, showing more posts from friends and family and updates that spark conversation means we’ll show less public content, including videos and other posts from publishers or businesses.

As we make these updates, Pages may see their reach, video watch time and referral traffic decrease. The impact will vary from Page to Page, driven by factors including the type of content they produce and how people interact with it. Pages making posts that people generally don’t react to or comment on could see the biggest decreases in distribution. Pages whose posts prompt conversations between friends will see less of an effect.

From Facebook's standpoint, this move is a pretty easy one to make. Even though it had spent the past few years heavily courting news publishers (including directly paying large publishers many millions of dollars to "pivot to video"), the company hadn't totally succeeded in becoming the go to source for news (that remains Twitter's strength). And yet, Facebook was also getting more and more grief over news items in its feeds, especially post-election when people incorrectly wanted to "blame" news on Facebook for Donald Trump's presidential victory.

On top of that, this move will only enforce something that Facebook had been inching towards for a while: forcing businesses and publishers to pay to have their news reach a larger audience. So... if this means that Facebook makes more money, distresses fewer people, and doesn't get attacked as much for the so-called problem of "fake news" it looks like a total win from Facebook's perspective.

Publishers, on the other hand, were generally freaked out. Many have spent the past 5 years or so desperately trying to "play the Facebook game." And, for many, it gave them a decent boost in traffic (if not much revenue). But, in the process, they proceeded to lose their direct connection to many readers. People coming to news sites from Facebook don't tend to be loyal readers. They're drive-bys.

This is why we actually think this is a good thing. As we've discussed in the past, if your entire business is reliant on someone else's platform, you're going to be in trouble. That other platform can pull the rug out from under you in an instant -- as may be the case here.

This is a big part of the reason that we've deliberately refused to "play the Facebook game" over the years, even as friends at other publishers kept telling us we were missing out on traffic. As I noted a few weeks ago in our 2017 wrap-up post, we're pretty proud of the fact that a plurality of our visitors are visiting directly, and that less than 20% of our visits come from social media. It suggests that our audience is pretty loyal, and I don't need to freak out about changes on any platform -- whether its social, search or something else.

Of course, it won't be surprising to see some publishers continue to throw away good resources and time towards trying to "game" this new system. As Facebook's announcement states, since it will promote content that people "interact" with, expect to see a lot of ridiculous "comment begging" or "share begging" from publishers. At Techdirt we've long forbidden any kind of "comment begging" in our posts (e.g., "Here's some crazy opinion! Do you agree or disagree? Let us know below!") because it feels cheap, manipulative and inauthentic, rather than genuine. I don't want to insult your intelligence with such things, but I expect many publishers, desperate for that Facebook traffic drip, will resort to that kind of thing.

The better solution, hopefully, is that many more publications will get over their needy relationship with platforms like Facebook, and focus on building actual, loyal audiences. If not, perhaps they'll go away. And, frankly, if they've spent the past few years living off of ephemeral Facebook traffic, it's not clear that many will miss them.

Filed Under: algorithms, business models, fake news, journalism, media, news feed, the facebook game
Companies: facebook

Texas Cops Arrest Journalist For Publishing Confidential Info Given To Her By A Police Officer

from the one-gets-a-paid-vacation,-one-gets-to-pay-to-head-off-an-unplanned-staycation dept

Something with a hint of retaliatory ugliness has reared its head in Laredo, Texas. Citizen journalist Priscilla Villarreal has been arrested for releasing information Texas law enforcement meant to keep secret. Villarreal -- a.k.a. Lagordiloca -- has been an unofficial fixture of Laredo nightlife for a few years now, cruising the town after dark to livestream footage of newsworthy events. She's well-known to local law enforcement, though not exactly well-liked, which may have something to do with her recent legal troubles.

Villarreal, 32, surrendered to Laredo police on December 13 after being charged with two felony counts of “misuse of official information,” stemming from her reporting on a Border Patrol agent’s suicide last April. Villarreal denies that she did anything illegal, and her attorney says the police department is simply trying to silence her because it does not like the way she reports. She often swears while she narrates her live-streamed footage, and she sometimes captures graphic images. She has been known to verbally spar with police officers in public.

"Misuse of official information" could be defined as nearly anything, thanks to its loose construction. It criminalizes the publication of information the government wishes to keep secret if the government feels the person doing the publication intended to profit from it or defraud someone by using it. Neither of those seem to fit Villarreal's actions, but that hasn't stopped the PD from moving forward with charges.

Police allege that Villarreal solicited information—the identity of a Border Patrol agent who committed suicide—from police officer Barbara Goodman before the department officially released that information through its public information office. “Information provided by Officer Goodman pertaining to the case in question was used by Priscilla Villarreal in her Facebook page ‘Lagordiloca News Laredo TX,’ immediately notifying her followers of the incident,” states the criminal complaint filed against Villarreal. “Villarreal’s access to this information and releasing it on ‘Lagordiloca News Laredo Tx,’ before the official release by the Laredo Police Department Public Information Officer placed her ‘Facebook’ page ahead of the local official news media which in turn gained her popularity in Facebook.

That last part -- "gaining popularity" -- is the linchpin of the Laredo PD's case. That's the closest the department can come to satisfying the "profit from" aspect of the law. But it's unclear that the attention of Facebook followers is enough to make these charges stick. This is the end result of a months-long investigation of Officer Goodman and Villarreal's relationship. According to the police, Officer Goodman and Villarreal had more than 500 phone conversations from January to July of 2016 -- some of them supposedly coinciding with Villareal broadcasts where information that hadn't been officially released by the department sometimes made its debut. Included in the info retrieved from Goodman's phone were messages about the Border Patrol agent who committed suicide.

If there's anyone at fault here, it's the officer handing out confidential information to the press. But no charges have been filed against Goodman, who may not have published the info, but handed it over to someone with the capability to do so. The PD only seems interested in Villarreal, who did nothing more than publish information given to her by a law enforcement officer.

This push by the Laredo PD to silence a journalist may end up being nothing more than a departmental embarrassment. Police officials probably should have discussed the proposed charges with their partner in crime(fighting) before issuing an arrest warrant.

The Webb County District Attorney's Office has never prosecuted a misuse of information case involving a citizen, the office's spokesperson said Friday.

There's no reason the DA should start now. The PD appears to have sniffed out the source of the leaks. It's that source who should face punishment for the violations the department is trying to pin on Villarreal. A journalist isn't expected to know what information is being rightfully withheld by law enforcement, and that determination is even harder to make when the info is received directly from a law enforcement officer. This looks far too much like the PD flexing its muscle to make life miserable for a freelance journalist officers don't particularly care for. It bears no resemblance to the actual job of law enforcement.

Filed Under: first amendment, journalism, lagordiloca, laredo, misuse of official information, priscilla villarreal, texas