NY Times And Washington Post Criticize Facebook Because The Chicago Tribune Had A Terrible Headline

from the wait,-whose-fault-is-it-now? dept

I'm going to try, once again, to do that stupid thing where I try to express a nuanced point on the internet, where there's a high likelihood of it being misunderstood. So, consider this opening a warning that you should read this entire article to try to get at the larger point.

And, along those lines, there are two parts to this story, and while much of it is going to point some fingers at the NY Times and Washington Post in how they presented a story that suggested blaming Facebook for something that isn't actually a Facebook issue, that shouldn't be seen as letting Facebook off the hook, because it doesn't come out of this story looking very good either. Basically, this is a story that shows how much more complex and complicated our information ecosystem is when it comes to misinformation, and simple blame games aren't necessarily that effective.

But, first, some background: for a long time, NY Times reporter Kevin Roose has used Facebook's own CrowdTangle tool to highlight what content on Facebook was getting the most engagement. It is a consistently useful tool in showing how claims that Facebook has an "anti-conservative bias" is bullshit. It constantly shows top "conservative" personalities like Ben Shapiro, Don Bongino, and others as having the most engagement on the site.

For reasons I don't fully understand, Facebook has always hated this, and has spent so much wasted effort repeatedly insisting that Roose's tracking of the numbers is not telling an accurate picture of what's happening on the site (even though he's using Facebook's own tool). Last week, Facebook launched a new offering which it seemed to hope would change the narrative on this. It's called the "Widely Viewed Content Report" (catchy!). And, obviously, it is true that "engagement" (what CrowdTangle shows) is not the be-all, end-all of what's happening on the site, but it is kinda weird how annoyed Facebook gets about the lists. You can almost hear the defensiveness in how they introduced this new report:

In this first quarterly report, our goal is to provide clarity around what people see in their Facebook News Feed, the different content types that appear in their Feed and the most-viewed domains, links, Pages and posts on the platform during the quarter. We believe this new report, when paired with the engagement data available in CrowdTangle, represents a more complete picture of what people see on Facebook. We plan to expand the scope of this report in future iterations.

And, to be fair, there is a bunch of interesting stuff in this report. It shows that, despite all the focus on Facebook links to outside sources, apparently 87% of content viewed in Facebook's News Feed doesn't even link to an outside source. And much of the rest of the report really leans hard on the fact that for most people, politics and news (and disinformation) are not a huge part of their Facebook experience. That's certainly very interesting, though it would be nicer if Facebook exposed the raw data, rather than doing this as quarterly reports.

The list doesn't just make Facebook look good though. As disinfo reporter Brandy Zadrozny dug out, one of the top links is a subscription link to the propaganda peddling Epoch Times, which is technically banned from advertising on Facebook, but the publication figured out something of a workaround through viral posts:

Anyway, a couple days after Facebook released all this, the NY Times came out with what is a legitimate scoop: Facebook had actually planned to release a version of this report earlier this year, but (according to the article) shelved it when the most-viewed link didn't look very good for Facebook. From the article:

In that report, a copy of which was provided to The Times, the most-viewed link was a news article with a headline suggesting that the coronavirus vaccine was at fault for the death of a Florida doctor. The report also showed that a Facebook page for The Epoch Times, an anti-China newspaper that spreads right-wing conspiracy theories, was the 19th-most-popular page on the platform for the first three months of 2021.

The report was nearing public release when some executives, including Alex Schultz, Facebook’s vice president of analytics and chief marketing officer, debated whether it would cause a public relations problem, according to the internal emails. The company decided to shelve it.

Now, the fact that Facebook would shelve the report because of the possible optics is bad. Flat out. No question about it at all. It also demonstrates why having to sit around and rely on Facebook to release this report every quarter rather than just sharing the data is always going to be questionable and not engender much trust.

But... (and this is important), the NY Times piece kinda buries something rather important here. That "most-viewed link" is not to some random disinformation site, or sketchy propaganda spewing news organization. It was... to an article from the (Pulitzer Prize winning) South Florida Sun Sentinel and then republished in the Chicago Tribune. The article was about a doctor who died after getting the COVID vaccine, and the title highlighted the "the CDC is investigating why." Notably, the NY Times published a very similar story to the one in the Chicago Tribune.

A day after the NY Times article, the Washington Post also published an article with the blaring headline: Facebook says post that cast doubt on covid-19 vaccine was most popular on the platform from January through March. It, too, completely buries the fact that the "casting doubt" came from the Sun Sentinel and Chicago Tribune.

The NY Times mentions the source of the "viral" article in the 13th paragraph. The WaPo article mentions it in the 5th paragraph.

To be honest, the NY Times article and framing is more defensible. It focuses on Facebook's (highly questionable) decision to shelve the report until there was a better link in the top slot. The reporters on the Times piece -- Davey Alba and Ryan Mac, both of whom, I should note, I think are generally top notch reporters on the tech beat -- have taken issue with people calling out this aspect of their reporting. Mac pointed out that the real issue wasn't so much the problems of the original Tribune/Sentinel story (which the NY Times also had a version of), but rather the users on Facebook sensationalizing the story to imply something about the vaccine. Alba, similarly, points out that the real news is the fact that the reason this article was so popular was that it was shared widely by anti-vax groups.

And... I can see that. But, somewhat ironically, all weekend on Twitter, I kept seeing Facebook haters sharing those NY Times and Washington Post articles in the exact same way that Alba and Mac are complaining about -- by misrepresenting the key newsworthy points, and instead using it to reinforce their prior beliefs (that Facebook was somehow bad).

Very, very, very few people were noting that this is all a lot more complex. It reminds me, yet again, of the research from Yochai Benkler that showed that disinformation really only goes viral on social media after more mainstream media presents a story.

The fact is the ecosystem is a lot more complex, and the ways to deal with it are a lot more nuanced than many people seem to want to discuss or admit. The framing of the Tribune/Sentinel articles was done in a way that it was easily predictable that anti-vaxxers would take the info and run with it. And, frankly, the framing of the NYT and WaPo articles were done similarly in a manner that anti-Facebookers would take the info and run with it. But the reality with both of these stories, and many more, is that they are a lot more complex. The media's role in all of this is important too: how they frame stories, and how those stories might be "weaponized" by those with narratives to tell matters. But we don't see much discussion of that.

Instead, everyone just wants to focus on Facebook, Facebook, Facebook. And, yes, the discussion about Facebook obviously needs to be a big part of the discussion. And Facebook just has a way in which it constantly seems to do the wrong thing at the wrong time (and it's handling of this mess isn't great). But it's not Facebook that wrote that Sun Sentinel article. So, why does Facebook deserve more of the blame for the fact that people took it and misrepresented it than the Sun Sentinel (and the Chicago Tribune who redistributed it)?

And, at a deeper level, if the idea is to point fingers -- who is more able to have helped to prevent that mess? Is it Facebook? For that to be true, Facebook would have to somehow know to distrust an article from the Chicago Tribune that it has no deeper knowledge of. That seems like a really big ask. On the other hand, it seems that the Sun Sentinel -- including the reporters and editors on that story -- as well as the Chicago Tribune, who actively chose to redistribute the story, all would have much more (a) knowledge and (b) ability to recognize the potential risk of how the story is framed, and (c) the ability to fix it.

We're not going to solve the problems associated with a bunch of people believing in nonsense if we ignore the underlying parties responsible for the content itself, and focus just on the intermediaries. That doesn't mean to ignore Facebook, but it's a reminder to view the overall ecosystem.

Filed Under: blame, disinformation, engagement, journalism, reporting, vaccines
Companies: facebook, ny times, washington post

New Study Suggests That YouTube's Recommendation Algorithm Isn't The Tool Of Radicalization Many People Believe (At Least Not Any More)

from the well,-look-at-that dept

It's become almost "common knowledge" that various social media recommendation engines "lead to radicalization." Just recently in giving a talk to telecom execs, I was told, point blank, that social media was clearly evil and clearly driving people into radicalization because "that's how you sell more ads" and that nothing I could say could convince them otherwise. Thankfully, though, there's a new study that throws some cold water on those claims, by showing that YouTube's algorithm -- at least in late 2019 -- appears to be doing the opposite.

To the contrary, these data suggest that YouTube's recommendation algorithm actively discourages viewers from visiting radicalizing or extremist content. Instead, the algorithm is shown to favor mainstream media and cable news content over independent YouTube channels....

Indeed, as you read through the report, it suggests that YouTube's algorithm if it has any bias at all, it's one towards bland centrism.

The recommendations algorithm advantages several groups to a significant extent. For example, we can see that when one watches a video that belongs to the Partisan Left category, the algorithm will present an estimated 3.4M impressions to the Center/Left MSM category more than it does the other way. On the contrary, we can see that the channels that suffer the most substantial disadvantages are again channels that fall outside mainstream media. Both right-wing and left-wing YouTuber channels are disadvantaged, with White Identitarian and Conspiracy channels being the least advantaged by the algorithm. For viewers of conspiracy channel videos, there are 5.5 million more recommendations to Partisan Right videos than vice versa.

We should also note that right-wing videos are not the only disadvantaged groups. Channels discussing topics such as social justice or socialist view are disadvantaged by the recommendations algorithm as well. The common feature of disadvantages channels is that their content creators are seldom broadcasting networks or mainstream journals. These channels are independent content creators.

Basically, YouTube is pushing people towards mainstream media sources. Whether or not you think that's a good thing is up to you. But at the very least, it doesn't appear to default to extremism as many people note. Of course, that doesn't mean that it's that way for everyone. Indeed, there are some people criticizing this study because it only studies non-logged in user recommendations. Nor does it mean that it wasn't like that in the past. This study was done recently, and it's been said that YouTube has been trying to adjust its algorithms quite a bit over the past few years in response to some of these criticisms.

However, this actually highlights some key points. Given enough public outcry, the big social media platforms have taken claims of "promoting extremism" seriously, and have taken efforts to deal with it (though, I'll also make a side prediction that some aggrieved conspiracy theorists will try to use this as evidence of "anti-conservative bias" despite it not showing that at all). Companies are still figuring much of this stuff out and insisting that because of some anecdotes of radicalization that it must always be so, is obviously jumping the gun quite a bit.

In a separate Medium blog post by one of the authors of the paper, Mark Ledwich, it's noted that the "these algorithms are radicalizing everyone" narrative also is grossly insulting to people's ability to think for themselves:

Penn State political scientists Joseph Philips and Kevin Munger describe this as the “Zombie Bite” model of YouTube radicalization, which treats users who watch radical content as “infected,” and that this infection spreads. As they see it, the only reason this theory has any weight is that “it implies an obvious policy solution, one which is flattering to the journalists and academics studying the phenomenon.” Rather than look for faults in the algorithm, Philips and Munger propose a “supply and demand” model of YouTube radicalization. If there is a demand for radical right-wing or left-wing content, the demand will be met with supply, regardless of what the algorithm suggests. YouTube, with its low barrier to entry and reliance on video, provides radical political communities with the perfect platform to meet a pre-existing demand.

Writers in old media frequently misrepresent YouTube’s algorithm and fail to acknowledge that recommendations are only one of many factors determining what people watch and how they wrestle with the new information they consume.

Is it true that some people may have had their views changed over time by watching a bunch of gradually more extreme videos? Sure. How many people did that actually happen to? We have little evidence to show that it's a lot. And, now, there is some real evidence suggesting that YouTube is less and less likely to push people in that direction if they're among those who might be susceptible to such a thing in the first place.

For what it's worth, the authors of the study have also created an interesting site, Recfluence.net where you can explore the recommendation path of various types of YouTube videos.

Filed Under: algorithms, engagement, radicalization, recommendation algorithm, recommendations
Companies: youtube

In Keeping And Improving News Comments, The Intercept Shows Websites What Giving A Damn Looks Like

from the this-muzzle-represents-my-love-for-you dept

For the last few years, the trend du jour in online media has been to demonize, vilify, then shutter the traditional news comment section. Usually these closures come with all manner of disingenuous nonsense about how websites are banning comments for the sake of "building relationships" or because the website in question just "really loves conversation." Usually, on-site users are then shoved toward social media silos at Twitter and Facebook we're told are "just as good" as an active, on-site community (read: doing this is cheaper and makes it somebody else's problem).

Traditionally, readers of these websites are told that news comments simply had to die because it's impossible to cultivate healthy discourse in the post-truth, mega-troll era. But as Techdirt and countless other websites have made clear for more than a decade, that's simply not true. And while being lazy, cheap and actively hostile to on-site community is any website's prerogative, this ignores the fact that online news comments are an excellent avenue for transparency and a tool to hold websites, and authors, accountable.

With so many websites muzzling community speech because they just so adore conversation, it's good to point out when websites swim upstream against this trend. For example the Intercept last month announced that the news outlet would be partnering with the The Coral Project at Mozilla to make their news comments system better via a myriad of changes to their commenting platform. The Coral Project interviewed some 300 individuals from 150 newsrooms in 30 countries as part of an effort to improve online discourse.

Informed by this research, The Intercept's changes include the ability to mute annoying users, the ability to track comment edits, a new offensive comment reporting feature, the "featuring" of exceptional comments by website staff, and the expanded ability of staff to interact with users that pose particularly important questions. Again, none of this is particularly revolutionary. Most of it involves treating readers like human beings. But in this day and age -- doing so is apparently now a revolutionary act.

As the Intercept's Glenn Greenwald and Rubina Madan Fillion note, lost in the vilification of comments sections as little more than troll gardens is the fact that on-site comments are a great way to hold journalists accountable:

"Journalists often tout their responsibility to hold the powerful accountable. Comments are a way to hold journalists themselves accountable. Unlike posts on social media, comments occupy the same space as the stories and travel with them as they’re shared across platforms. Comments also make it possible for people to share their reactions without having to connect them to a social media account. That’s why we continue to be strong proponents of comments and encourage our colleagues at The Intercept to read (and respond to) them."

Again, for better or worse news in the modern era is a conversation. Muting your on-site audience may feel good to editors on tight budgets, tired of trolls, and wistful for the bygone days of carefully-chosen letters to the editor, but it's doing your community (and the news industry at large) a disservice. As such, the Intercept's moves are a welcome change of pace for an industry that has spent the last few years insisting that muzzling your readership somehow represents a breathless dedication to quality online discourse.

Filed Under: comments, engagement, the intercept

Taiwan's g0v: Using Open-Source Code And Communities To Engage Citizens And Make Government More Open

from the building-on-sunflowers dept

Back in April, we wrote about massive protests that took place in Taiwan as a result of a lack of transparency during trade negotiations with mainland China. Those protests became part of what is now known as the Sunflower student movement, whose name refers to the use of sunflowers by the protesters as a symbol of hope. Techpresident has a fascinating article looking at the Taiwanese online community called g0v, which has been playing a key part in the Sunflower movement, and which is now trying to make government more open and accessible using open source tools:

g0v believes that current online participation tools like social media outlets and online message boards fell short in creating offline action or collaboration. g0v places itself at the center of open-sourced, hands-on, and public-spirited activism with a desire to engage citizens to create real social change.

g0v's work is proving that open-source communities can successfully open up and improve government. Ideologically, g0v does not believe that its activism needs to create an enemy out of government, but rather that everyone -- the government and the people -- wins when creative solutions improve existing public structures.

The post goes on to describe g0v's hackathons, its first conference, and the Open Political Donation Project. This brought together 9,000 volunteers to digitize 300,000 political donation records as a pointed response to Taiwan's old Campaign Donation Act of 2004, which allowed the public access to campaign donation documents, but only as a paper copy, or in person at a government office.

What's fascinating here is to see how the people involved in the Sunflower student movement have moved on from simply protesting against something -- Taiwan's secret trade negotiations with China -- to creating new tools to open up government and engage citizens. As the Techpresident piece concludes:

g0v's brand of activism is about making sure government does its job better. g0v explains on its website, it substituted the "o" in gov for a "0" to change the way we see government working. Through civic tech, hacktivism, and a belief that government can and should work, g0v is already showing that it can change the way that government sees itself and the way that people can interact with their government.

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

Filed Under: activists, communities, engagement, g0v, open government, politics, taiwan

State Dept. Spent $630,000 Buying Likes, But That Was Actually The Least Of Its Engagement Problem

from the and-honestly,-no-one-truly-'likes'-the-government-except-the-government dept

The release of a report from the Inspector General on the Bureau of Internal Information Programs (BIIP) brings with it the surprising news that the various agencies under its purview spent $630,000 pursuing Facebook "likes" in an attempt to increase their popularity. Normally, I would be setting the keyboard to "Mock Relentlessly," but this isn't so much a case of the government blowing tax dollars on stupid stuff as it is a case of using the wrong tool (bureaucracy) for the job (increasing engagement). That being said, it still means the money was ultimately wasted, but not in the "espresso machine in every cubicle" sort of way. (And there will probably be a little mocking.)

The Bureau of International Information Programs is supposed to be the leading edge for the State Department's public relations front, as John Hudson points out in his article for Foreign Policy.

The IG report stings -- especially because the Bureau of International Information and Programs is supposed to be Foggy Bottom's epicenter of online savvy. The bureau includes groovy-sounding divisions such as the Office of Innovative Engagement, which evangelizes on the "importance of using online engagement to drive offline, person-to-person activities and events." The bureau's stated mission is to be Foggy Bottom's "foreign-facing public diplomacy communications bureau" and supports its "growing social media community that numbers over 22 million followers."

An attempt to harness the power of social media through the bureaucratic interworking of 150 agencies is doomed from the start. It makes it very difficult to hone in on a clear strategy and avoid creating a disjointed, inconsistent mess. What makes it impossible is "leadership" that fails to meet even the laxest definition of the word. This is the first thing that greets readers of the report once they scroll past the introductory material, listed as the first item under "Key Judgements."

Bureau of International Information Programs (IIP) leadership failed to convey its strategic vision to staff members, despite formalized communications. Leadership created an atmosphere of secrecy, suspicion, and uncertainty.

"Secrecy, suspicion and uncertainty" are certainly hallmarks of government leadership. It's never a good thing, but it's certainly much worse when the intended aim is to present a unified and engaging social media presence.

According to the report, first flagged by the Diplopundit, overlap and coordination issues trouble the various bureau's 150 social media accounts. The report also mentions a "pervasive perception of cronyism" exacerbating its already "serious morale problem."

Cronyism is also a hallmark of government leadership, common enough that this perception will likely never go away. And again, 150 social media accounts, steered by dozens of agencies with no clear guidance, is a recipe for public affairs disaster. Added to the stultifying mix of secrecy, suspicion, uncertainty and a "perception" of cronyism is the crippling banality of bureaucracy, something that takes a straightforward job and turns it into a soul-deadening morass where the left hand doesn't know what the right hand's doing, but both have signed off on it -- in triplicate.

There is overlap and a lack of clarity in the functions and responsibilities between the Office of Web Engagement and the Office of Innovative Engagement. Staffing gaps in the latter, coupled with a 15-month vacancy in the director position, have left the office adrift and less able to play its role as the bureau's new technology pioneer.

An example of overlap is IIP's 20/100/100 program, which helps 20 embassies at a time raise their social media fan base by 100 percent in 100 days. At the conclusion of an embassy's participation in the program, its social media staff members frequently turn to the Office of Web Engagement rather than the Office of Innovative Engagement for advice. As the number of participating embassies rises with each round of the program, the advising function is shifting to the Office of Web Engagement, drawing staff members away from their primary duties.

The Inspector General does a marvelous job attempting to convey the relation and primary of two nearly identically named offices, but it's obvious the staff views the two as interchangeable. Logically, it would seem the Office of Web Engagement would cover, well, web engagement. The IG explains the distinction between the two, but it isn't so much an explanation as it is a statement of "This is for This." It also fails to clarify how an understaffed office that has run without a director for 15 months is supposed to handle the very important (to the BIIP, at least) social media functions.

The Office of Innovative Engagement is the proper place for this function for two reasons. First, its mandate is to keep up with the latest changes in social media rules and approaches. Second, it runs the Social Media Hub, the Department's primary repository of this information.

In summation, the Inspector General recommends "clarifying the roles, scope and responsibilities" of these two separate, but largely similar offices. It would seem a name change would go a long way towards clearing things up, or better yet, combining the two since everyone's used to going to the wrong place anyway. The staffing issue would be somewhat mitigated and there would actually be someone filling the director position.

As is to be expected from the preceding info, the Department's social media "strategy" seems to be the result of staffers being asked to hit targets (see the 20/100/100 program above) but given very little guidance on how to achieve these goals.

With the Department's use of social media comes strategic questions of the role, purpose, and limitations of the medium. A consensus is emerging that developing numbers of Facebook followers and Twitter fans may not lead automatically to target audience engagement...

The actual worth of a "Like" or a Twitter follower is still up for discussion, but you can go a long way towards negating the value of both by placing numbers ahead of engagement.

The bureau spent about $630,000 on the two campaigns and succeeded in increasing the fans of the English Facebook pages from about 100,000 to more than 2 million for each page. Advertising also helped increase interest in the foreign language pages; by March 2013, they ranged from 68,000 to more than 450,000 fans.

Much of this expense came in the form of paid post promotion, something Facebook makes almost mandatory if you're going to reach the maximum number of "fans." Then again, paying to push it to everyone's feed isn't a guarantee that it will be seen, much less engaged with. Paying for eyeballs also carries with it a faint hint of gaming the system, something both largely ineffective and somewhat morally suspect.

Many in the bureau criticize the advertising campaigns as "buying fans" who may have once clicked on an ad or "liked" a photo but have no real interest in the topic and have never engaged further...

IIP's four global thematic English-language Facebook pages had garnered more than 2.5 million fans each by mid-March 2013; the number actually engaging with each page was considerably smaller, with just over 2 percent "liking," sharing, or commenting on any item within the previous week. Engagement on each posting varied, and most of that interaction was in the form of "likes." Many postings had fewer than 100 comments or shares...

The Inspector notes that engagement is "a means, not an end." The true purpose of the State Departments social media presence is to "accomplish specific PD (Public Diplomacy) goals." This may be true, but if these offices are going to utilize social media, it's rather hard to achieve the "ends" without putting more thought and care into the "means." (Or, at the very least, some sort of unified front.)

Government entities face a much more uphill battle for hearts and minds than commercial entities, considering there's usually no end product to admire and no day-to-day presence in their lives. These entities also tend to view social media as a top-down structure from which they can dump press releases and photo ops onto the masses. This is not unlike government in general which, with the notable exception of campaign season, tends to operate in the same fashion.

If these departments are unwilling to engage on a level that actually feels like engagement to the public, chances are achieving "public diplomacy" goals via social media will be next to impossible. "Managing" this with a bureaucractic layers of redundancy only makes things worse. "Social media" isn't "regular media." It has little interest in regurgitating press releases and waiting around until government officials decide it's convenient to "address the media." The "macro" effort might benefit from committees and 68-point "Recommendations" directive, but the "micro" moves too quickly for that.

What the Inspector General found concerning the State Department and its use of social media is exactly what anyone should have expected to be discovered. The government is bureaucratic, something that meshes not at all with social media. Paying for "Likes" is the least of the State Department's social media problems. The largest problem is that what's detailed in this report is the natural state of many government entities and it's unlikely to be solved by rearranging the desks and issuing "clarifying" memos.

Filed Under: buying likes, engagement, likes, social media, state department, us government

TechCrunch Admits That Using Facebook Comments Drove Away Most Of Their Commenters

from the treat-your-community-right dept

I must admit to something of a minor fascination in how other sites manage their comments. As we've noted many times, we've personally found that keeping our comments pretty wide open fosters the best sorts of discussions in the long run. Yes, like any sites, there are some users who are annoying, and some who exhibit trollish behavior, but most people can get past that pretty quick. In fact, at times, those people (while frustrating initially) can spur some really interesting conversations. One thing we've never quite understood, however, is the attack on anonymity that so many sites insist upon. As we've seen over and over again, many of our most insightful comments have come from anonymous commenters.

So I was actually surprised a few years ago when TechCrunch moved to switch all of its comments to Facebook comments, claiming that one of the good things about it was that it required you to provide your real name. Apparently that wasn't actually such a good thing for lots and lots of commenters -- as after nearly two years, TechCrunch has dumped Facebook comments and is pleading for commenters to come back.

Our comments are obviously far from perfect, but we've never been at a loss for having spirited discussions on nearly all of our posts. There's just something awesome about the community that likes to really dig into the various stories. That's part of why we've always viewed this site as a discussion site, rather than a "news" or "reporting site." We post stuff with our opinion because we expect people to respond -- good or bad, agree or disagree -- in the comments, and for some sort of discussion to ensue. That doesn't mean that we like to encourage trollish behavior, but we recognize that encouraging a real community has its benefits, and one key aspect to that is keeping the barrier low. Too many other sites seem to think the best way to deal with the messiness of some annoying commenters is to make it more difficult to comment. However, as TechCrunch has discovered, like chemotherapy, it's a solution that can kill off many of the "good" cells along with the "bad."

Filed Under: anonymity, comments, community, ease of use, engagement, facebook comments, openness, techcrunch
Companies: facebook

Murdoch's Big Bet Gone Bad: iPad Only Publication Not Engaging Readers Much

from the that-was-tough dept

You know, it really wasn't that hard to predict that the brainchild of Rupert and James Murdoch -- an iPad-only news publication, called The Daily, that people would pay for -- would flop. The Murdochs (father and son) don't have a particularly good history of succeeding on the internet. In fact, they have a history that is mostly littered with failure when it comes to internet ventures. But, in an age when ubiquity, availability, access and sharing are what consumers want, coming up with a publication that was locked down, specific to a single platform, and quite limited, just seemed like a bad recipe from the start. We'd already noted that a bunch of the "big name" journalists and staffers that had been brought on to The Daily had been leaving just weeks after the publication launched.

But what about readers? While the Murdochs have been quiet, the folks over at Nieman Lab put together a nice proxy, in looking at how many people were Tweeting stories from The Daily's iPad app. I'm sure it's not a perfect correlation, but if people were really engaged with the news from The Daily -- which, increasingly, is an important aspect of news communities, you would expected to see this number continue to go up. Instead, as Joshua Benton describes, it's "decline, plateau, decline." Here's the graphical representation: Again, this almost certainly does not represent a direct correlation to readership. We see stories that gets lots of traffic get very few tweets or comments, and stories with relatively little traffic get a ton of comments. But, on the whole, as an overall proxy, it at least suggests something not good is going on at The Daily in terms of actually getting readers engaged.

And, I think, that's the obvious problem the Murdochs always run into with their online efforts. They're good at producing content. They're dreadful at actually engaging with a community. They bought MySpace, but their failure to understand what people there wanted resulted in its rather massive decline. It seems clear, with the Daily, that engagement and interacting were an afterthought. At best, it was a "let them tweet!" sort of discussion, rather than a look at how to actually engage the community in any meaningful way.

Filed Under: engagement, subscriptions, the daily
Companies: news corp.

Newspaper Tells Reporters Not To Engage With Community

from the the-view-from-nowhere dept

We've pointed out over and over again that one of the main things that legacy newspapers get wrong today is this idea that they're in the "news" business, rather than the "community" business. They've always been in the community business, and then they take that community -- which they build up around news -- and sell their attention to advertisers. The problem, which much of the industry is facing, is that they're no longer the only game in town when it comes to the community stuff. But rather than recognize that and improve their community efforts and features, many newspapers seem to be going in the other direction: putting up paywalls and avoiding the community. For example, Mathew Ingram got his hands on the official "social media policy" of the Toronto Star newspaper, in which the paper tells its staff not to engage with readers online, for fear that this might be a sign of "bias."

As well, journalists should refrain from debating issues within the Star�s online comments forum to avoid any suggestion that they may be biased in their reporting.

Seriously. This is a classic example of what journalism professor Jay Rosen refers to as "the view from nowhere," in which a media property spends so much effort trying to make sure that no one thinks it actually has an opinion on anything, that it won't even step in to clear up what's factual and what's not. Too many news organizations feel the need to "present both sides of the story," as if because there are two sides, they're equally balanced, and presenting them both as equal is the equivalent of "objective reporting." It's not. It's inherently biasing whatever side is not being truthful or accurate. In such cases, the press, while hiding behind a claim of being "objective," is really biased in that it's giving undue support to factually incorrect or misleading arguments.

Furthermore, pretending that your staff doesn't actually have an opinion makes them seem robotic and less human. I understand why people value "objective reporting," but pretending someone doesn't have an opinion doesn't make the reporting any more objective than having the reporter clearly state what that opinion might be. Beyond letting people calibrate the rest of that reporter's coverage, it actually shows that the reporter is human and makes them more able to connect with fans.

But apparently, that's not what the Toronto Star wants.

Of course, even worse than these bad social media policies is the Toronto Star's response to the leak and Ingram's story about their policies. The paper's spokesperson, Bob Hepburn, told Ingram that the policy was fine because it is "well in line with what mainstream media organizations have always done. We've always placed some limitations on journalists in terms of them expressing their opinions, either in the newspaper or outside of the newspaper."

I've heard people say that, "if someone tells you a deal term must remain because it's 'standard,' it means they don't understand why it's there either." That seems to be the Toronto Star's response here. Yes, we have braindead, shortsighted and self-defeating social media policies that do more harm than good... but it's okay because they're the same braindead, shortsighted and self-defeating social media policies most of our competitors have. Now there's a standard of excellence to strive for: let's make sure we make the same mistakes everyone else makes.

Filed Under: engagement, journalism
Companies: toronto star

Using Technology To Bring Out Creativity In Children

from the best-practices dept

A few weeks ago, we mentioned an experiment that we were doing, to try to create more useful and engaging ad products, specifically with a "conversational" ad unit on the front page of the site. The initial ad centered on a discussion of ways in which kids could use tablet computers (the ad and post were sponsored by ASUS and Microsoft). We're running another experiment now. On the article page for this post, or on the front page of Techdirt right after the first post (if you don't run an ad blocker), we have an ad unit that asks for your input on the question of what kinds of computing activities might best develop kids creativity. It shows my answer and asks you to "vote" for one of four activities and then allows to type in a more complete answer -- all from within the unit (so it's not taking you to some other page). This is very much an experiment, and we already learned some things from the first pass at this (some stuff worked, some didn't), and we'll be doing some more as well. In order to keep the feedback in that ad unit, I've disabled comments on this post.

This post should also be considered sponsored by ASUS Windows Slate, in partnership with Microsoft and SAYMedia.

Filed Under: advertising, children, creativity, engagement, tablets

Study Suggests That The Internet Makes Youth 'More Engaged Citizens'

from the that's-a-good-thing,-right? dept

Following on our recent post discussing Clay Shirky's views concerning social media's role in helping to politicize people who were formerly not all that interested in politics, Shocklee points us to news of a recent study that has found, indeed, that high school students who use the internet to research key interests "were more likely to become involved in 'civic and political issues.'" And it appears that this greater involvement goes beyond just posting about it online, but really becoming more involved in certain causes. This seems to counter the claims of some that online interest in civil and political issues is more just people screaming in front of their computers. It actually does seem to have a real impact.

Filed Under: activism, engagement, internet, politics, social media, studies, youth