Courts Shoot Down Yet Another FCC Proposal For Being Factually Sketchy

from the facts-and-stuff dept

As the net neutrality fracas made clear, Ajit Pai's FCC has been widely criticized for playing a bit fast and loose with the facts (read: disregarding facts entirely) as it rushes to eliminate most meaningful oversight of media and telecom giants (and the arguably broken markets they inhabit). For example, the net neutrality repeal was based in large part on bogus data directly copied from telecom lobbyists with zero real effort to disguise that fact.

And while that's not a big deal to Pai or the kind of partisan true believers who see no problem with Pai pandering to telecom and media giants, the courts have tended to see things differently. For example, Pai's attempts to strip away broadband subsidies for tribal residents was recently shot down by the courts for failing to provide any real supporting justification whatsoever. The courts also recently shot down most of an FCC wireless proposal that attempted to eliminate local authority (including things like environmental impact review) over cellular tower placement. Here too the courts found the FCC failed utterly to provide actual data supporting its policy shift.

Fast forward to this week and one begins to sense a bit of a theme. This week the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit issued a ruling (pdf) shooting down the Trump FCC's attempt to obliterate media ownership limits to aid giants like Sinclair Broadcasting, who've had an eye on cornering the already semi-lobotomized local broadcasting sector.

Throughout much of 2017, the FCC worked overtime to eliminate decades-old media consolidation protections designed to prevent any one broadcaster from dominating the media space. Historically these rules have had broad bipartisan support, given smaller right and left wing outlets alike worry about being crushed by media monopolies who've cornered local TV markets. But the court ruled that the FCC completely ignored the impact mindless media consolidation would have on the quality of local journalism, the public, or women and people of color:

In a 2-1 new ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit forced the FCC to go back to the drawing board in its quest to make life easier for media giants, arguing the agency “did not adequately consider the effect its sweeping rule changes will have on ownership of broadcast media by women and racial minorities."..."[the court stated] that FCC analysis justifying its decision was “so insubstantial that it would receive a failing grade in any introductory statistics class."

That's, you know, not subtle. The data on this subject is pretty clear. As Media broadcast giants hoover up local broadcast stations and eliminate quality local newsrooms, they're replacing quality, more culturally diverse local journalism with homogenized, mindless prattle. This lower quality "journalism" not only opens the door to less transparency and more corruption, but it results in more partisan, tribal political coverage that erodes nuance. In turn, data shows the public ends up less informed and more divided than ever, a measurable shift that can be profound enough to sway elections.

A lot of the FCC's movements on this front were framed as "modernization" of media regulations, though the real goal appears to have been to help Sinclair Broadcasting and its attempted merger with Tribune. But while the FCC spent much of 2017 chipping away at these rules to seemingly aid Sinclair, the deal ultimately had to be scrapped anyway after Sinclair was ironically caught allegedly lying to the FCC and engaging in a number of shell games to give the illusion that the deal would fall under the media ownership cap.

The FCC's continued failure to support its policies with actual data is a bit of a trend, as former FCC lawyer Gigi Sohn suggests:

"In his desire to destroy as many protections for consumers, diversity, competition and democracy as quickly as possible, the Chairman has forgotten one of the core tenants of administrative law; that an agency must adequately justify its decisions based on the record before it,” Sohn said."

Again, while making up facts may play well to Pai's partisan supporters and feel good to folks who think with their gut, it's not working out particularly well in the courts. And given Pai's net neutrality repeal (which not only gutted net neutrality but FCC authority) is based on a long list of provably false claims, there's a sense that Pai's attack on net neutrality could soon share a similar fate.

Filed Under: 3rd circuit, ajit pai, arbitrary and capricious, evidence, fcc, media ownership, statistics
Companies: sinclair broadcasting

The Oakland PD's Dramatic Drop In Use-Of-Force Incidents Is All Bullshit

from the numbers-massaged-and-manually-pleasured dept

Well, this post of mine has aged terribly.

Back in 2014, I breathlessly reported the Oakland PD's adoption of body cameras had resulted in sweeping improvements to its use of force. Deadly force usage had dropped to nothing, reducing the number of people killed by cops from eight per year to zero.

That still holds. If you just look at dead bodies, you'll see that the Oakland PD had produced zero corpses in the 18 months following the installation of body cameras. But other stats in that report are a bit more questionable.

[Mayor] Jean Quan said Oakland police officers had 2,186 use-of-force incidents in 2009, the last year that no officers wore body cameras, and that number declined to 836 such incidents last year and to only 572 incidents so far this year, with just two weeks remaining.

Were body cams really the panacea? Did this program actually introduce accountability?

Unfortunately, it appears the body cams changed nothing. Precipitous drops in use of force incidents have continued. Year after year, the Oakland PD appeared to improve its relationship to the public in terms of subjecting them to physical restraint or bullets.

But the drop observed here has turned out to be too good to be true. Turns out the easiest way to reduce use of force stats is to… stop reporting uses of force.

[I]n September 2018, the Oakland police’s inspector general, an internal watchdog, found that officers under-reported the number of times they pointed their guns at people. In November, the department’s independent monitor confirmed the inspector general’s determination while also noting multiple cases in which officers struck or wrestled with people and failed to report it.

The report [PDF] by the Oakland PD's Inspector General shows officers fudging numbers to make it appear as though the force was using less force. There may have been little to no improvement whatsoever, even with the addition of body cameras. I mean, thank god the force didn't keep killing eight people a year, but beyond the periodic homicide, there has been little improvement.

Substantial drops in several use of force stats prompted this IG investigation, as well as an internal review initiated by the PD itself. What investigators found was very little change in use of force habits, but a lot of change in use of force documentation.

Pulling a sample of incidents in which use of force would be expected, the OIG found officers simply weren't documenting their force deployments.

All documentation and available video footage for the 47 incidents were reviewed. Of these 47 incidents, the auditors identified 17 in which a reportable use of force went unreported (no use of force form was completed).

You've heard the "bad apples" excuse. It appears the rotten apples within the Oakland PD tend to gravitate towards each other.

Twelve of the 17 incidents of underreporting involved four squads of officers.

It's not all bad news, though. The department was at least forward-thinking enough to believe certain cases might need additional review. This policy would at least give a second pass to "contempt of cop" arrests.

The Chief published a Special Order requiring supervisory review of PDRD footage for incidents involving Penal Code 69, 148, and 243(b)(c) arrests (threatening an officer, resisting arrest, battery on an officer) in late November 2018.

But there's plenty of bad news. The Oakland PD instituted policies meant to compile objective reporting of use of force incidents. But then it undermined its own policies by allowing officers to make judgment calls on reporting.

In practice, a police officer’s “intention” is a dominant factor in determining whether the pointing of the firearm at the subject(s) is reportable, a result of an inadequately designed policy.

Because of these deficiencies, the Oakland PD revamped its policies in 2018. This resulted in a dramatic change in use of force stats, albeit not in the direction one would hope.

[B]eginning in October 2018, the total number of reported uses of force (all types of force) increased dramatically, by nearly 300% between January and May 2018 and January and May 2019.

So, it's mostly bad news, highlighted by the uptick in force deployment post-policy fix. Even with the fixes, the OIG found even more under-reporting.

Upon review of the associated video recordings for the 47 incidents likely to involve force in which the arrests were more probable to have involved a use of force, there were 177 incidents in which the Lead Auditors deemed a reportable weaponless defense technique or pointing of a firearm(s) was used and not reported and documented.

It's not just about guns. These are a few cases the OIG highlights in its report, showing even use of less-than-deadly force went unreported despite the new policies.

1. Officers were in a foot pursuit of a subject and an officer forcefully pushed the subject, causing him to fall on the ground against a fence. The reporting officer stated in his report “no known witnesses.” OIG’s review of the associated video footage identified multiple witnesses on scene when the force in question was used.

2. Officers were attempting to place a subject in handcuffs, and the subject stood up and punched an officer in the face. Another officer wrapped his arms around the subject, physically lifting him off the ground causing them both to fall backwards onto a glass table and then lifted the subject back onto a couch.

3. A detained subject started to run from an officer, and the officer grabbed the subject by the hair and pulled him to the ground. The officer failed to articulate and document in his report that he pulled the subject by his hair.

4. During the search of a subject, the subject turned to run, and the officer grabbed him, causing them both to fall to the ground. The officer also delivered an intentional forearm strike to the subject’s right tricep area while attempting to handcuff the subject.

Cops may complain body cameras are nothing more than "gotcha" devices meant to catch them abusing people and violating their rights. The flow of these policemen's tears would mean oh so much more if the body cameras didn't catch them abusing people and violating their rights. So, if nothing else, the body cameras are exposing what officers hoped to cover up by not filing use of force reports.

Then there's this: cops may argue they don't engaged in biased policing, but the stats belie their protestations of "fair and balanced" enforcement.

There were 12 incidents involving 19 subjects in which the audit found the pointing of the firearm should have been reported as a use of force but was not. Of the 19 subjects, 17 were African American (89%) and 2 were Hispanic (11%).

So, every time a white person has a gun pointed at them by an Oakland PD officer, it gets reported. That seems a bit troublesome.

And there's little reason to believe the ongoing use of body cameras will result in more conscientious policing. Officers apparently believe recording interactions with the public is optional.

Upon review of the associated video recordings for the 47 incidents likely to involve force in which the arrests were more probable to have involved a use of force, the lead auditors determined there were PDRD concerns in 19 incidents. However, 18 of the 19 incidents involved officers not complying with PDRD policy requirements.

Fortunately, the large number of cameras issued ensure there was at least some footage of every use of force incident. Unfortunately for officers who "forgot" to activate their cameras, other officers activated theirs, giving investigators all they needed to discover multiple violations of the PD's body camera policies.

The Oakland PD only looks better on paper. It has barely changed at all since the institution of body cameras and use of force reporting requirements. Some cops hate accountability and many apparently view this as damage to be routed around. Until the PD steps up and starts firing people for violating policy, the practice of fudging the numbers and neglecting camera obligations will continue.

Filed Under: body cameras, lies, oakland, police, statistics, use of force

DHS Oversight Looks At 'Unreliable' Border Assault Numbers, Decides Under-Reporting Is The Problem

from the fake-numbers,-fake-news dept

The DHS says assaults on CBP and Border Patrol officers have been steadily increasing since 2015, with a 46.3% surge in violence against officers in 2017 alone. Sure, it fits the current narrative that undocumented immigrants are inherently dangerous. But is it true? Not even remotely.

The CBP and Border Patrol are using new math to report assaults, allowing the DHS to portray patrolling the border as far more dangerous than it actually is. The Intercept exposed the bogus math earlier this year, thanks to a CBP official's inadvertently frank admission the numbers were incredibly inflated.

Almost the entire increase — 271 purported assaults — was said to have occurred in one sector, the Rio Grande Valley, in South Texas. A large number of the assaults supposedly occurred on a single day, according to charts and details provided by Christiana Coleman, a CBP public affairs spokesperson. In response to questions from The Intercept, Coleman explained in an email that “an incident in the Rio Grande Valley Sector on February 14, 2017, involved seven U.S. Border Patrol Agents assaulted by six subjects utilizing three different types of projectiles (rocks, bottles, and tree branches), totaling 126 assaults.”

What should have been classified as six or seven assaults at the most was recast as 126 assaults during a single incident. This should have prompted some Congressional concern about the CBP's reporting processes. It didn't. Instead, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs "expressed concern" about the perceived increase in assaults and asked the DHS Inspector General to get to the bottom of it.

This "concern" predated the Intercept's exposure of the bogus math, so it might explain why the IG believes under-reporting might be the problem, rather than the Jesus-like ability to feed hundreds of dangerous foreigner narratives using only a couple of larger altercations. The report [PDF] says the numbers are "unreliable," but doesn't focus on the real reason the yearly assault totals are suddenly increasing after a period of steady decline.

Here are the numbers since 2010:

And here's what the IG feels the problem is.

In response to a request from the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs for information on assaults on CBP and ICE law enforcement officers, we determined that, from fiscal years 2010 to 2017, the number of assaults against CBP law enforcement officers decreased from 1,089 to 856. During the same time period, assaults of ICE law enforcement officers remained the same at 48. However, the data does not show a clear trend over that time period and the number of assaults varied widely from year to year. Our analysis also shows that, for a number of reasons, the data is unreliable and does not accurately reflect whether assaults have increased or decreased. For example, although both components introduced new reporting systems in FY 2016, law enforcement officers continue to use informal methods instead to document assaults and remain unfamiliar with these reporting systems. Further, the officers do not always report acts of physical resistance or attempted assaults, even when required to do so.

Unsurprisingly, the DHS, CBP, Border Patrol, and ICE are all willing to take steps to increase the number of reported assaults. If these agencies can gain the sympathies of Congressional committees by inflating numbers and over-reporting assaults, they have everything to gain. The recommendations include more training for officers to help them recognize assaults and expanding the definition of assault to include "physical touch" or resisting arrest. If someone picks up a rock or tree branch but never uses it against an officer, that's also an assault.

This should ensure the number of reported assaults continues to increase, shoring up the administration's fear-based immigration platform. Adding the expanded "assault" definition to the CBP's bogus math, a single subject resisting arrest has "assaulted" every officer involved in the takedown, whether they were injured or not. The CBP's force multiplier can turn one strenuous arrest into a half-dozen assaults and "concerned" Congressional committees can take it from there.

The use of bogus multiplication is completely ignored in this report. Someone in Congress needs to send a letter to the IG telling the office to take a look at the sketchy math behind the "unreliable" numbers. CBP et al can't be trusted to tell the truth about officer safety until this has received a thorough examination.

Filed Under: border assault, border patrol, cbp, dhs, made up stats, new math, statistics

Dubious Studies And Easy Headlines: No, A New Report Does Not Clearly Show Facebook Leads To Hate Crimes

from the it-ain't-that-simple dept

You may have seen a big story from the NY Times making the rounds this week, entitled Facebook Fueled Anti-Refugee Attacks in Germany, New Research Suggests. For fairly obvious reasons, lots of people are interested in this story. There's plenty of concern lately about how social media is impacting our lives, and clear evidence of it leading to attacks on refugees would certainly be useful. The NY Times, in ways that the NY Times does best, is somewhat breathless in propping up the claims in the report.

One thing stuck out. Towns where Facebook use was higher than average, like Altena, reliably experienced more attacks on refugees. That held true in virtually any sort of community — big city or small town; affluent or struggling; liberal haven or far-right stronghold — suggesting that the link applies universally.

Their reams of data converged on a breathtaking statistic: Wherever per-person Facebook use rose to one standard deviation above the national average, attacks on refugees increased by about 50 percent.

Nationwide, the researchers estimated in an interview, this effect drove one-tenth of all anti-refugee violence.

The uptick in violence did not correlate with general web use or other related factors; this was not about the internet as an open platform for mobilization or communication. It was particular to Facebook.

Those are some fairly bold claims, and certainly worth exploring. However, it's not exactly clear that the paper actually can support such claims. You can download a copy of the 75 page paper yourself, entitled Fanning the Flames of Hate: Social Media and Hate Crime by two PhD students, Karsten Müller and Carlo Schwarz, both from the University of Warwick. For what it's worth, people have pointed out that this paper has not yet been peer reviewed, and an earlier version of this paper got some less breathless press coverage a few months ago. But, the NY Times is the NY Times.

The paper definitely presents some interesting data, and it should be applauded that researchers are exploring these issues -- though separating out the actual causal variables seems like a difficult task. The researchers do appear to have fairly thorough data on anti-refugee attacks throughout Germany. The Facebook data, however, seems a lot less solid. A few people have been breaking down the problems with the study online, including Jonas Kaiser, Dean Eckles and Hal Hodson, who all convincingly argue that the NY Times is overplaying what the study actually shows.

Before I dig in a bit, I should note that part of the problem here is that the necessary Facebook data to do this kind of study is hard to come by. Earlier this year, Facebook announced that it would be giving some academics access to data in order to do just this kind of research (though more focused on election impact, but this should be similar). And, it would be damn helpful if Facebook were willing to give out the kind of data needed in order to actually do the kind of study that was presented in this paper.

But, so far, it has not. And that meant these two students had to try to create proxies. And... there are some questions about how they did that. To be fair, the researchers do try a variety of methods and use a variety of tools to see if they can tease out problems with their data or alternative variables that may be driving the results -- and thus the research is not just cherry picking data points. However, it does rely on a some fundamental assumptions, and those assumptions may not be valid. Specifically, in an attempt to measure "anti-refugee hate speech," they focus on one particular page: that of the relatively new, extreme anti-refugee political party Alternative for Germany, referred to as AfD.

We create a measure for the salience of anti-refugee hate speech on social media based on the Facebook page of the "Alternative für Deutschland" (Alternative for Germany, AfD hereafter), a relatively new right-wing party that became the third-strongest faction in the German parliament following the 2017 federal election. The AfD has positioned itself as an anti-refugee and anti-immigration party; with more than 300,000 likes, it also has more followers than any other German party on Facebook (see Appendix A for a history of the AfD). This widespread reach makes the AfD's Facebook page uniquely suited to measure anti-refugee sentiment on social media.

[....]

We measure the exposure of a municipality to Germany-wide anti-refugee sentiment using the share of the population that is active on the AfD Facebook page. Using this proxy for social media usage, we found that anti-refugee hate crimes disproportionally increase in areas with higher Facebook usage during periods of high anti-refugee salience. This effect is especially pronounced for violent incidents against refugees, such as arson and assault. Taken at face value, this suggests a role for social media in the transmission of online hate speech into violent crimes.

And then there's... this. Rather than measure overall Facebook usage in Germany (again, here's where Facebook could be of assistance), the researchers measured... Facebook likes of the "Nutella Germany" page (for what it's worth, Kaiser claims there is no Nutella Germany page). Why Nutella? Your guess is as good as mine. The researchers sort of brush past why that's the correct metric:

We further probe the social media channel in additional tests. We show that our results also hold for measures of general Facebook usage that are independent of support for the AfD. In particular, we create proxies for municipality-level Facebook usage by drawing on the number of users on the "Nutella Germany" page. With over 32 million likes, Nutella has one of the most popular Facebook pages in Germany and therefore provides a measure of general Facebook media use at the municipality level. We also use the Nutella data to create a dummy for municipalities with many Nutella users within a county. This measure is orthogonal to a plethora of observable characteristics, most importantly general internet usage, voting patterns, education, \pull-factors" such as immigration and religious composition, and proxies of xenophobic attitudes. We show that municipalities with many Nutella users per capita also experience more anti-refugee incidents in times of high refugee salience on the AfD page { unless access to social media is disrupted by internet or Facebook outages.

There's a lot of jargon in there, but one key point to pull out: the research shows that cities with more Nutella likers per capita experience more anti-refugee incidents. Right. So forget that they used AfD's website as a proxy, and recognize that their study might also suggest that eating Nutella leads to anti-refugee violence and... it might call into question some of the usefulness of the study.

There are some other concerns as well. MIT professor and statistician Dean Eckles notes a huge red flag: all of the "robustness" checks in the paper support their thesis. He notes that a good research paper should include robustness tests that push the analysis past the breaking point to see where their theory breaks down. But that does not happen with this paper:

A separate issue is that the eye-opening stat that the NY Times provides is that line "wherever per-person Facebook use rose to one standard deviation above the national average, attacks on refugees increased by about 50 percent." However, a number of people are suggesting that this number is not correct and presented misleadingly. First, apparently while an earlier version of the paper had 50%, the latest version revised that down to 35%. That's a pretty big difference -- and one that the NY Times should correct. Second, the fact that the paper would shift so dramatically on that number between revisions also raises some red flags. Finally, as science writer Ferris Jabr points out in researching this number, there are a lot of assumptions built into this result, that are not necessarily well supported.

In short, there are a lot of concerns with the conclusions of the paper, and as there are huge questions about the assumptions used to make this point, as well as the potential quality of the overall paper, it seems absolutely crazy for the NY Times to run a big article suggesting that these results are solid, and without raising any of the concerns.

That's not to say that a more thorough study wouldn't find the same thing. It might. And, again, this is the kind of thing where it would be super helpful if Facebook were willing to release the necessary data, so no one would have to fiddle around with German Nutella fans. But, at the very least, we shouldn't be going around making policy based on a draft paper that hasn't carefully been vetted. And, yet, there are already some reports claiming that the German government is discussing this study, almost certainly based on the NY Times reporting, rather than a critical analysis of the study itself.

There are huge accusations in this study, and the NY Times has already stretched them much further than they probably should have been stretched -- and without presenting much of the context or concerns about the assumptions. Before governments go rushing off to try to "do something" about this, perhaps we should take a step back and look for a bit more thorough and tested research.

Filed Under: germany, hate crimes, nutella, research, social media, statistics, studies, violence

Traffic Is Fake, Audience Numbers Are Garbage, And Nobody Knows How Many People See Anything

from the stabs-in-the-dark dept

How many living, breathing human beings really read Techdirt? The truth — the most basic, rarely-spoken truth — is that we have no earthly idea. With very few exceptions, no media property big or small, new or old, online or off, can truly tell you how big its audience is. They may have never thought about it that way — after all, we all get as close as we can to what we think is a reasonably accurate estimation, though we have no way of confirming that — but all these numbers are actually good for (maybe) is relative comparisons. What does it really mean when someone says "a million people" saw something? Or ten or a hundred million? I don't know, and neither do you. (Netflix might, but we'll get to that later.)

Where should we start? How about this: internet traffic is half-fake and everyone's known it for years, but there's no incentive to actually acknowledge it. The situation is technically improving: 2015 was hailed (quietly, among people who aren't in charge of selling advertising) as a banner year because humans took back the majority with a stunning 51.5% share of online traffic, so hurray for that I guess. All the analytics suites, the ad networks and the tracking pixels can try as they might to filter the rest out, and there's plenty of advice on the endless Sisyphean task of helping them do so, but considering at least half of all that bot traffic comes from bots that fall into the "malicious" or at least "unauthorized" category, and thus have every incentive to subvert the mostly-voluntary systems that are our first line of defence against bots... Well, good luck. We already know that Alexa rankings are garbage, but what does this say about even the internal numbers that sites use to sell ad space? Could they even be off by a factor of 10? I don't know, and neither do you. Hell, we don't even know how accurate the 51.5% figure is — it could be way off... in either direction.

Okay, so what about TV ratings? Well, there's a reason they've been made fun of on the shows themselves for as long as our culture has been able to handle "meta" jokes without getting a headache. Nielsen ratings in their classic form are built on monitoring such a tiny sample of households that the whole country's viewing profile can probably be swayed because someone forgot to turn off the TV before going on vacation. They sucked before DVRs and digital distribution began transforming the single household television into a quaint anachronism, and now it's just chaos. Nielsen was slow to catch up with DVRs, and now the TV industry juggles scattered measurements including three or seven days of viewing beyond live air, and constantly complains that the ratings are off — specifically, that they're too low. And they might be right, in the sense that they are too low by comparison to the garbage ratings from the pre-digital age that everyone eventually embraced as a standard for relative rankings. How big are these audiences really, in terms of real living breathing human beings? I don't know, and neither do you.

YouTube view counts? Subject to all the same fake internet traffic problems, plus the fact that there's an opaque system for supposedly ignoring too-short incomplete views according to the genre and nature of the video, but good luck finding out how accurate that is. Channel operators know their length-of-view statistics, but you don't see them bandying them about much. Plus, how often have you heard public view counts casually referred to as the number of "people" who watched something, even though (especially when it comes to short-and-cute viral animal hits and their ilk) the bulk of them probably come from obsessive re-watching? Yeah.

So what about Facebook stats? Everything from impressions to simultaneous live video viewers is padded out by the most transient of idly-scrolling-through-the-newsfeed interactions. Twitter followings and tweet stats? Dig into the bowels of any list of followers, or any trending link, and see how much of it is mindless bots. Print readerships? Don't even get me started. Did you know it's common practice for newspapers to calculate their readership by applying a multiplier to their actual circulation, to account for an imaginary surplus of "readers per copy"? Yes, that soggy "local" paper that's been sitting out in the rain on your porch for two days, and that only exists to give them an excuse to deliver flyers to your door, is not only being counted — it's probably being counted five times. So are all the free/cheap copies that big national papers give to hotels. Oh, and when these companies distribute multiple publications in different channels — with newspapers, magazines and paywalled websites all being given away with each other as free cross-subscriptions, in order to pad out all three subscriber numbers — they add them all up and then try to determine the actual number of individual people they are reaching. How? By applying an opaque "deduplication" formula. I once pressed a newspaper's stats person about what this formula could possibly entail, but details were not forthcoming — because I suspect they just knock off 20% and call it a day, despite the fact that the magazine is distributed inside the newspaper whose audience they are supposedly "deduplicating" it from, and half the website subscriptions were free add-ons with print delivery. That's awfully generous when the truth is they don't know, and neither do I, and neither do you.

So who does know how big of an audience they really have? Well, maybe Netflix, Amazon and other digital subscription services. Their paywalls insulate them from the bulk of random bot traffic, and their proprietary ecosystems give them the ability to closely monitor all activity. Netflix, of course, is famously secretive about viewer numbers and insists on the inaccuracy of those who claim to have worked them out. The most common assumption is that they do this to avoid giving content creators too much leverage, and because the data can be seen as a valuable commodity — but I propose another reason: Netflix's likely-more-accurate statistics, if made public, would have zero context in the topsy-turvy world of nonsense TV ratings. They would probably look exceptionally low, giving the legacy bosses who would like nothing more than to downplay the importance of digital distribution (and there are as many of those as there are record execs who can't spell mp3) a chance to project whatever narrative they wanted onto the numbers.

So why does any of this matter? Because advertising is a multibillion dollar industry, and whenever an industry is worth that much, you have to ask: is that because there are billions of dollars of worthwhile transactions happening, or because every bloodsucker in a ten-industry radius wanted in on the action? So, so much of the advertising industry is pure waste. How much exactly is as impossible to determine as the audience sizes themselves. This is hardly a new idea (in fact it's a century-old quote) but it's probably more true now than ever, despite the fact that in theory technology could have delivered us from uncertainty.

Finally, what can be done about this? There's no simple answer, and maybe no answer at all. Here at Techdirt, we've been working to come up with good advertising solutions by focusing almost entirely on what we know our community likes and might be interested in (as in, our real community of people who talk in our comments and we can say, with confidence, exist) and paying less attention to raw numbers — both a luxury and a necessity for a smaller publication, depending on how you look at it. That's not always easy though, as we face an advertising industry ruled by metrics, where there are often ten spreadsheet-wielding interns between us and someone who might actually care about our creativity. In our experiments with more traditional algorithmic display advertising to monetize the raw traffic numbers we do have, we keep running up against what appears to be a universal truth: the bulk of the global internet ad ecosystem runs on trash. Gigantic prestigious online media brands can sell display campaigns straight to the same people who buy Superbowl ads — everyone else receives a hundred pitches a week from new ad networks that claim to deliver great, relevant content but in fact litter your site with ads for fad diets and ambulance-chasers (at best). And this lowest-common-denominator filler appears to be the only reliably successful form of internet advertising! At least, it never goes away when the good stuff does, and the proud quality networks eventually embrace their roles as crap-peddlers. "Good" internet advertising is a rickety ship navigating an endless roiling ocean of spam, clickbait and outright fraud — but it couldn't float at all without it.

I realize I've painted a grim picture, but these are (more or less) the facts. I'm surely wrong in some of my guesses, but like everything discussed here, nobody knows how wrong or in which direction. We'll never even really know how many people read this — we'll just have a vague estimate that can be compared to other posts on Techdirt. But for now that's the reality, so maybe more people should stop worrying about the supposed size of their audience, and focus on making the content they want to make.

Filed Under: audience, internet, measurements, statistics, traffic

Daily Deal: The Essential Data Analysis Bundle

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

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Filed Under: daily deal, data, statistics

Despite Massive Streaming Revenue Gains, RIAA Still Lying & Crying

from the give-'em-an-inch dept

The legacy recording industry just has a way with attacking any new technology service that helps it adapt, doesn't it? Whether it's ringtones or video games or YouTube or iTunes, the industry always takes the same basic approach: denounce the new offering as evil. Threaten and/or sue. Maybe take some equity as a way to "settle" the legal threats/suits. And then squeeze the companies for more and more money until they're dead. It's happened over and over again, and we're now witnessing the same thing again in streaming music -- even as it's turning into a major cash cow. For whatever reason, to make this work, the industry wants to turn this cash cow into an enemy.

And a strange enemy at that, as none of my enemies are paying me $2.4 billion a year in revenue. But that's what the RIAA's own data shows came in to its coffers for 2015, representing an enormous upward trend in streaming revenue for the music industry.

In its earnings statement, the RIAA noted that when all types of streaming are combined (subscription, ad-supported on-demand and SoundExchange), it constitutes $2.4 billion in revenue for 2015—a rise of 29 percent over the previous year.

Yet it took exactly no time at all for RIAA CEO Cary Sherman to laugh that revenue off as wholly insufficient.

While today’s data is encouraging, the challenges facing us are significant. The consumption of music is skyrocketing, but revenues for creators have not kept pace. In 2015, fans listened to hundreds of billions of audio and video music streams through on-demand ad-supported digital services like YouTube, but revenues from such services have been meager — far less than other kinds of music services.

So, revenue from streaming services is growing at a one-third clip over previous years, but that's just not enough. And this statement is made even as the RIAA and some of its member artists do everything possible to hamper, block, and outright shut down the streaming services that are producing this revenue for them.

And then there's this bit of pure bullshit:

Need further proof that some fundamental market distortions are at play? Last year, 17 million vinyl albums, a legacy format enjoying a bit of a resurgence, generated more revenues than billions and billions of on-demand free streams: $416 million compared to $385 million for on-demand free streams.

Want to talk about "market distortions," Cary? How about the fact that you're being blatantly dishonest in presenting these numbers, taking the gross "retail value" on vinyl, but for free streams talking about the wholesale net value to you. You're leaving out a ton of relevant details: First, retail value isn't actual revenue, as it ignores the reality of discounts and other pricing differences. Second, and more importantly, you're leaving out the fact that much of the money from retail value doesn't go to the labels, but to the retailers, distributors and to cover production costs of the actual records. Third, with free streaming, you have none of those costs, and the contracts you have with streaming companies mean a much greater percentage of the revenue actually goes to the labels. Fourth, free streaming does two useful things that you ignore: (1) moves people away from infringement, where you earn nothing and (2) moves many people up the chain to paid streaming.

But, I guess if someone is going to be familiar with "market distortions" and how to misrepresent reality, it would be the RIAA.

Beyond that, the claim here is that artists aren't making as much as was made in the old vinyl and CD eras. First, I don't even know if that's true, but even if we accept that claim...so what? Streaming, by the RIAA's own data, is now the majority revenue producer in the music industry. In other words, that's the direction the market is going. But there is nothing promised in business and if the new model means revenues aren't equal to the old model, that doesn't mean there something wrong with the model. It may certainly mean that there's something wrong with the RIAA's model, but not the one so heavily in demand by consumers and generating the majority of RIAA revenue.

And there is certainly nothing in this to suggest that streaming is harming music as an art form. Far from it, actually. As Cary Sherman notes, music consumption is up, up, up. Does Sherman really mean to suggest either that streaming services aren't contributing to that rise, or that wider music consumption isn't ripe to be monetized by any number of forward thinking business models?

Filed Under: cary sherman, free streaming, recording industry, revenues, statistics, streaming, streaming music, vinyl
Companies: riaa

Techdirt 2015: The Numbers.

from the so-many-numbers dept

It's become something of a yearly tradition around here, soon after the new year, to tally up some of the stats from the just completed year. If you'd like to look back at them all, you can see "the numbers" from 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011 and 2010 when we started this little tradition.

In 2015, we had visitors from 235 countries -- down from 240 the year before. Of course, towards the bottom of the list there are very very few visits, and there is some debate over whether or not some of these actually count as countries. As always happens, visitors from the US gave us almost exactly two-thirds of our traffic (66.82% -- down just a hair from 66.95% the year before). Canada (just barely) nudged out the UK as the number two country, providing 6.54% of our visitors, with the UK at 6.46%. Australia and Germany round out the top five again. The next five countries are exactly the same from 2014: India, the Netherlands, France, Sweden and New Zealand.

Last year, we noted that the Philippines was the surprise winner for the second most visitors from Asia (after India), but this year Singapore passed the Philippines. After that there's Turkey (if you consider Turkey a part of Asia), Japan, Israel (same note as Turkey) and Indonesia. China provided very, very few visits, which isn't a huge surprise as we've been told at times that we've been blocked in the country.

The top countries in Europe, obviously, are mostly listed above in the overall top 10, but in case you're wondering, the next five top European countries are: Italy, Ireland, Spain, Finland and Norway. Again, these are the same countries as last year, but with a bit of movement among the countries (Italy moved up, while Spain moved down), but all five of those countries send a similar amount of traffic (between 2 and 3% of our total traffic for each of those five).

Across the Americas, obviously US and Canada are the two biggest (by far), but they're followed by Brazil, Mexico and Argentina (again, same as last year!). In Africa, once again, South Africa provides the most visitors, but unlike in past years where that was the only really significant traffic, this year Kenya drove a lot of traffic (perhaps because a Kenyan lawyer wrote a blog post, and a series of angry emails to me, where he cc'd others) claiming that my critique of Kenyan copyright law was "defamatory." Nigeria, Egypt and Algeria round out the top five.

For years we joked that we got no visits from North Korea, but in 2013 we got 2, and last year that doubled to four. In 2015, however, it went back down to zero. They must be really cracking down on internet access. Also, every year that we've done this, we've joked about the fact that we appear to get a single visit from Christmas Island... but that went away this year. Sorry to whomever I offended there.

As is always the case, the longest visits are from Gibralter (by an insane amount), and every year PaulT takes credit for this (thanks Paul!). If we look at countries that send significant traffic, the Kiwis down in New Zealand stick around the longest, followed by the Canadians. That's two countries somewhat well known for having friendly people, so they also seem to like spending more time on Techdirt. That rocks. Of countries that send a lot of traffic, visitors from India check out the most pages per visit.

Moving on to city data, the numbers here look pretty much the same as always: New York, London, LA, San Francisco and Chicago (identical to last year's list). The next five on the list changed a bit though. In 2015 it was Toronto, Washington DC, Seattle, Houston and Sydney. The big mover was... Washington DC, which hadn't been in the top 10 before. As I've noted in the past, it's tough to make too much of the city data, considering the differences in population.

On the technology front, Chrome continues to be the primary browser people use to visit the site (47.94% of visits), followed by Firefox (19.15%) and Safari (14.33%). Remember the good old days when Microsoft was abusing its monopoly power to own the browser market? Whatever happened to those guys? Mobile traffic continued to grow, but not that much. Last year it was about 36% and this year it 39%. For the first time Android has edged out iOS. In 2014 they were close, but iOS was 51% of mobile visits and Android at 44%. But in 2015, they were both at 47%, with Android just barely higher. Windows Phone makes up most of the rest, with a tiny few folks on Blackberry and Series40. Also, someone out there visits with Nintendo 3DS. Who are you?

Not surprisingly the iPhone represents 32% of all mobile visits and another 14% comes from the iPad. For Android devices, the Google Nexus 5 is the leader, followed closely by the Samsung S5 and the Google Nexus 7. In fact, basically all of the top Android devices are either Google Nexuses (Nexi?) or Samsung Galaxies. The first device that's not one of those is the OnePlus One... but that's the phone I use, so perhaps it distorts the stats.

Not surprisingly, the biggest ISPs for traffic are Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Verizon. I'm actually a bit surprised to see AT&T drop pretty far down the list, behind Charter and Cox.

The percentage of people who are coming "direct" to Techdirt, rather than from third parties, is increasing. Last year it was 30.5%. This year it's 38.5%. To me, that's a good thing. Lots of sites spend lots of time focusing on gaming search engines or social media with click bait. We try to focus on building a loyal community of readers who like to come back. However, when people are coming from other sites, they're most frequently coming from Reddit (34% of our referral traffic), followed by Facebook and then Twitter. The big drivers of non-social traffic were: Instapundit, Daily Rotation, Boing Boing, Hacker News, Fark, Slashdot and Ars Technica. Not too many surprises there. Popehat was on last year's list, but apparently Ken White and friends have stopped linking to me.

In terms of search traffic, for the second year in a row (unfortunately), the single biggest driver of traffic were... searches for "Walter O'Brien" -- the guy who appears to have lied his way to a prime time show on CBS. Also, lots of searches on AT&T and Comcast...

Okay, now it's time for our big lists for 2015.

Top Ten Stories, by unique pageviews, on Techdirt for 2015:

1. The Cartoonist Has No Idea How Net Neutrality Works
2. After Endless Demonization Of Encryption, Police Find Paris Attackers Coordinated Via Unencrypted SMS
3. Smoking Gun: MPAA Emails Reveal Plan To Run Anti-Google Smear Campaign Via Today Show And WSJ
4. Remember That Undeletable Super Cookie Verizon Claimed Wouldn't Be Abused? Yeah, Well, Funny Story...
5. Years Of Pretending Netflix Cord Cutting Wasn't Real Is Biting The Cable Industry In The Ass
6. FBI Uncovers Another Of Its Own Plots, Senator Feinstein Responds By Saying We Should Censor The Internet
7. Cable Proudly Declares Smart Shoppers A 'Lower Quality' Of Customer They Have No Interest In
8. Happy Birthday Copyright Bombshell: New Evidence Warner Music Previously Hid Shows Song Is Public Domain
9. President Obama Demands Critics Tell Him What's Wrong With TPP; Of Course We Can't Do That Because He Won't Show Us The Agreement
10. Another Story Of A 'Fake' Brilliant Inventor? Is 'Scorpion Walter O'Brien' A Real Computer Security Genius?

You may notice that that last story, about Walter O'Brien, is actually from 2014, not 2015, but as mentioned above in the part about searches, it continues to get so much traffic that it made the top 10 trafficked stories in 2015. If you think that's not fair and want the tenth story that was actually written in 2015, it's: The Two Leading Presidential Candidates -- Clinton And Trump -- Are Both Mocking Free Speech On The Internet.

There's a pretty good mix of stories there. Net neutrality/ISP/cord cutting stuff gets a lot of attention, a few stories on copyright. Some free speech stuff. Politicians acting badly. Basically the key kinds of stories we regularly cover. I'm glad that you guys like them.

2015's Top Ten Stories, by comment volume:

1. Microsoft Retrofitting Windows 7, 8.1 With Windows 10's Privacy-Invading 'Features': 344 comments
2. All Of These Works Should Be In The Public Domain, But Aren't: 303 comments
3. School, Police Chief Must Face Lawsuit Brought By Student Suspended For 10 Days For Tweeting 'Actually, Yes': 211 comments
4. Parents Sue School, Claim Wi-Fi Made Son Sick: 211 comments
5. Texas Police Arrest Kid For Building A Clock: 211 comments
6. Smoking Gun: MPAA Emails Reveal Plan To Run Anti-Google Smear Campaign Via Today Show And WSJ: 199 comments
7. Even If You Think Kim Dotcom Is Guilty As Sin, The US Government Stealing His Assets Should Concern You: 199 comments
8. Hillary Clinton Wants A 'Manhattan Project' For Encryption... But Not A Back Door. That Makes No Sense: 198 comments
9. Windows 10 Reserves The Right To Block Pirated Games And 'Unauthorized' Hardware: 191 comments
10. Iranian Cleric Suggests The West Ban And Criminalize Negative Portrayals Of Muslims To Prevent Radicalization: 183 comments.

We point this out every year, but again it's worth noting that there's almost no overlap between the two lists above. Just because a story gets a lot of comments, it doesn't mean that it's getting a lot of traffic (often, it means that two or three people are engaged in a long debate). Similarly some high traffic posts don't get that many comments. There's only one story on both lists.

Next up: the commenters.

2015 Top Commenters, by comment volume

1. John Fenderson: 3158 comments
2. That One Guy: 2574 comments
3. nasch: 2238 comments
4. Uriel-238: 1886 comments
5. tqk: 1691 comments
6. Ninja: 1378 comments
7. PaulT: 1305 comments
8. Mason Wheeler: 906 comments
9. Sheogorath: 808 comments
10. DannyB: 703 comments

The top two slots are the same as they were last year, though John Fenderson's comment total was cut by almost 50% -- what a slacker! Either way, this makes four years in a row that John is our top commenter. That's quite a streak. PaulT is the only one who has been on this list every year since we started, and nasch only missed it one year. Also, last year I made the 9th slot myself, and I noted an oddity: I only seemed to appear in the lists for even years (2010, 2012 and 2014). And, so I guess it shouldn't be a surprise that I didn't make the cut in 2015. Such is life! But, watch out for my comments in 2016. The "newcomers" to the list this year are Uriel-238, tqk and Sheogorath. Nice work.

Top 10 Most Insightful Commenters, based on how many times they got the lightbulb icon:

1. That One Guy: 356 comments (14%)
2. John Fenderson: 232 comments (7%)
3. Ninja: 104 comments (8%)
4. Mason Wheeler: 96 comments (11%)
5. PaulT: 92 comments (7%)
6. jupiterkansas: 85 comments (13%)
7. Gwiz: 78 comments (14%)
8. That Anonymous Coward: 67 comments (14%)
9. Roger Strong: 63 comments (11%)
10. Uriel-238: 59 comments (3%)

That One Guy unseated John Fenderson for the lead in this category after the two were reversed last year (and the year before that John was in second while That One Guy was in fourth).

Top 10 Funniest Commenters, based on how many times they got the LOL icon:

1. DannyB: 35 comments (5%)
2. Roger Strong: 34 comments (6%)
3. That One Guy: 33 comments (1%)
4. Violynne: 23 comments (7%)
5. Ninja: 22 comments (2%)
6. Mason Wheeler: 17 comments (2%)
7. jupiterkansas: 16 comments (2%)
8. John Fenderson: 15 comments (0.5%)
9. TechDescartes: 14 comments (35%)
10. That Anonymous Coward: 11 comments (2%)

Continuing a trend we saw last year, it's getting harder and harder to get the funny icon with any real consistency. But, a special callout needs to go to TechDescartes, who appears to have just shown up on the site very recently, but is getting an insane number of funny comment awards (and a bunch of insightful comments too). Keep it up! It reminds me of the old days when Karl used to dominate the insightful column (come back Karl!).

Okay, that's it. I think we've now officially closed the books on 2015 and I look forward to an eventful 2016...

Filed Under: 2015, numbers, statistics, techdirt

Sting Operation Shows How Full Of Crap Health Journals Are When It Comes To Dietary Studies

from the eat-it dept

Look, I probably don't have to tell you Techdirt readers this, but I'm a strange sort of cat. I could go into all the reasons why I'm odd, but whenever I try to explain to people how non-normal I am, I usually just reveal this little bit of truth: I hate chocolate. No, I don't not-love chocolate. Nor do I dislike chocolate. I fucking hate it, nearly as much as I hate how low I appeared on this ingenious bit of sleuthing a commenter did in determining which Techdirt writers swear the most (a list which I insist is fucking bullshit, by the way). That said, everyone else loves chocolate, of course, so I'm sure they and many others were thrilled to see so many well-respected publications blaring headlines recently about how chocolate can help reduce weight. I'd show you a bunch of links to those stories put forth by supposedly well-respected journalism outlets and scientific journals that make heavy claims about peer-reviews and fact-checking, but I can't because most of those stories have been pulled. Why?

Because the whole thing was a bullshit hoax put on by a journalist to make the point that, at least when it comes to studies around diet and health, the journals and the media the reports on their papers are largely full of crap. Go read that entire thing, because it's absolutely fascinating, but I'll happily give you the truncated version. John Bohannon, who has a Ph.D in molecular biology of bacteria and is also a journalist, conspired with a German reporter, Peter Onneken, to see how badly they could fool the media to create BS headlines. They did this by turning John Bohannon into Johannes Bohannon (obviously) and creating a website for The Institute of Diet and Health, which isn't actually a thing. Then they conducted a very real study with three groups: 1 group eating a low-carb diet, 1 group eating their regular diet, and 1 group eating a low-carb diet and a 1.5oz bar of dark chocolate daily. After running background on the groups, conducting blood tests to correct for disease and eating disorders, and hiring a German doctor and statistician to perform the study, away they went. The results?

Onneken then turned to his friend Alex Droste-Haars, a financial analyst, to crunch the numbers. One beer-fueled weekend later and... jackpot! Both of the treatment groups lost about 5 pounds over the course of the study, while the control group’s average body weight fluctuated up and down around zero. But the people on the low-carb diet plus chocolate? They lost weight 10 percent faster. Not only was that difference statistically significant, but the chocolate group had better cholesterol readings and higher scores on the well-being survey.

Bam, results! Not just results, but results the media would absolutely love to sink their idiotic teeth into. The problem? Well, the method for running the entire study was bullshit.

Here’s a dirty little science secret: If you measure a large number of things about a small number of people, you are almost guaranteed to get a “statistically significant” result. Our study included 18 different measurements—weight, cholesterol, sodium, blood protein levels, sleep quality, well-being, etc.—from 15 people. (One subject was dropped.) That study design is a recipe for false positives.

Think of the measurements as lottery tickets. Each one has a small chance of paying off in the form of a “significant” result that we can spin a story around and sell to the media. The more tickets you buy, the more likely you are to win. We didn’t know exactly what would pan out—the headline could have been that chocolate improves sleep or lowers blood pressure—but we knew our chances of getting at least one “statistically significant” result were pretty good.

Bohannon goes into some of the gory math, and it really is fun to read, but this is pretty easy to understand. With a small enough sample size and testing for as wide a range of results and factors as possible, you absolutely expect to find greater variance than if your study was testing for less factors or had a higher sample size. It's simple: people are different and testing less people makes those difference statistically appear to be more significant.

Anyway, the team then went to the International Archives of Medicine, which Bohannon identifies as a "fake journal" publisher. In other words, pay enough Euros and your "study" gets "published", all without the bothersome time-waster known as being peer-reviewed. Not that IAM doesn't claim to be reviewed. It certainly does make that claim, but after payment was accepted Bohannon found that their study had been accepted without change. And, keep in mind, this study is designed to be bad. So, once the study had been published, it was time for the PR machine to swing into action.

Take a look at the press release I cooked up. It has everything. In reporter lingo: a sexy lede, a clear nut graf, some punchy quotes, and a kicker. And there’s no need to even read the scientific paper because the key details are already boiled down. I took special care to keep it accurate. Rather than tricking journalists, the goal was to lure them with a completely typical press release about a research paper. (Of course, what’s missing is the number of subjects and the minuscule weight differences between the groups.) But a good press release isn’t enough. Reporters are also hungry for “art,” something pretty to show their readers. So Onneken and Löbl shot some promotional video clips and commissioned freelance artists to write an acoustic ballad and even a rap about chocolate and weight loss. (It turns out you can hire people on the internet to do nearly anything.)

Onneken wrote a German press release and reached out directly to German media outlets. The promise of an “exclusive” story is very tempting, even if it’s fake. Then he blasted the German press release out on wire service based in Austria, and the English one went out on NewsWire. There was no quality control. That was left to the reporters.

And it didn't take the reporters long to pick up this crap-on-a-stick and run with it like children after the ice cream truck. Not all of them, but some of the stories are still up. The Daily Star covered their paper, for instance, as did the Times of India, international editions of The Huffington Post, and some television news programs. Men's Health was going to go with a story in September, though that probably won't run now. Shape Magazine didn't get off so lucky, with their story appearing in the June issue, in print. And remember, this is all bullshit. None of it is real. How does something like this happen?

The answer is lazy "journalists."

When reporters contacted me at all, they asked perfunctory questions. “Why do you think chocolate accelerates weight loss? Do you have any advice for our readers?” Almost no one asked how many subjects we tested, and no one reported that number. Not a single reporter seems to have contacted an outside researcher. None are quoted. These publications, though many command large audiences, are not exactly paragons of journalistic virtue. So it’s not surprising that they would simply grab a bit of digital chum for the headline, harvest the pageviews, and move on. But even the supposedly rigorous outlets that picked the study up failed to spot the holes.

Now, there is some humor in all of this, but also danger. It's one thing to claim that chocolate leads to weight loss and have the media run wild with it, but we all know that fad diets and exciting health claims rain down on us in buckets, and I think it's safe to say that not all of them are as harmless as Bohannon's. The average person hasn't done much thinking about the validity of these studies that they read about in the media; they simply trust the media to do the fact-checking. The media, it appears, largely trusts the journals to do the reviews and fact-checking. Except some (many?) of those journals don't. The whole thing harkens back to one of the funnier moments in the Anchorman movie, when the main character makes a ludicrous claim about women's brains being smaller than men's, and then punctuates the statement with a smirk, saying, "It's science." As far as much of the media reporting goes, it might as well be "science."

Strangely, Bohannon notes that readers of the articles were apparently more skeptical than the authors.

There was one glint of hope in this tragicomedy. While the reporters just regurgitated our “findings,” many readers were thoughtful and skeptical. In the online comments, they posed questions that the reporters should have asked.

“Why are calories not counted on any of the individuals?” asked a reader on a bodybuilding forum. “The domain [for the Institute of Diet and Health web site] was registered at the beginning of March, and dozens of blogs and news magazines (see Google) spread this study without knowing what or who stands behind it,” said a reader beneath the story in Focus, one of Germany’s leading online magazines. Or as one prescient reader of the 4 April story in the Daily Express put it, “Every day is April Fool’s in nutrition.”

If we've reached a time when readers are more skeptical than the reporters, that's a massive problem for journalism, but perhaps a delightful sign for the spread of skepticism and inquiry amongst the public. Either way, look with a critical eye the next time you hear about that fad diet or health food claim.

Filed Under: chocolate, fooling journalists, hoax, journalism, science, statistics, studies, weight loss