I'm sure some perfectly nice people had access to the opaque Stanford-aligned Zuckerberg-controlled CrowdTangle tool. But it was a placeholder solution that postponed this reckoning.
For a decade, it seemed, I thought surely the "research lab" employees would evangelize healthy social media habits & news rituals. With the refreshing exception of Joan Donovan -- who actually gave the public a few tools -- I heard only shaded language from the other elite researchers who ... I guess ... shared their CrowdTangle findings with the White House? When COVID started and I heard no change from the "lab" I joined a data-journalism collaborative, then developed my own software-journalism project which I'm still running.
After CUNY's Craig Newmark School of Journalism Prof Jeff Jarvis followed his supplicant tome "What Would Google Do" with an AI-Hype-timed book tour to announce copyright is obsolete (it's not obsolete) and to claim that book-inspired songs and adapted screenplays couldn't be copyrighted (they are copyrighted) it was time to shift gears. One could reasonably call Jarvising the use of the wandering pronoun "your fault, journalists" "our fault, journalists" to deftly keep the blame on journalism's best practices & practitioners https://buzzmachine.com/2008/10/08/it-is-our-fault/https://medium.com/whither-news/our-problem-isnt-fake-news-our-problems-are-trust-and-manipulation-5bfbcd716440 while posing as a champion of journalism.
The "deal" Brian describes here gives more money to universities, less to community-facing news production.
After a lab employee took to Wired to pan the California BOT Disclosure law as "inept", the misaligned incentives to kill journalism under the guise of helping universities fight misinformation became more clear. https://www.wired.com/story/law-makes-bots-identify-themselves/
Given that this was inevitable after Canada’s failure (they had to renegotiate with Google and Facebook is still holding out) I get your frustration with this fraught attempt. The big story is buried though: the AI money going to a non-profit which is likely a cutout for the US intel community along the lines of the Stanford Internet Observatory that allows government to manage the news narrative. Keep digging on this!
Not to be defending the BS that went on with this situation, but it IS true that technology has changed the playing field of information and infotainment in modern society and it is also true that journalism has always been co-opted by press owners, ad execs, government officials, crisis managers, and big corporations. And, with some notable exceptions, journalists have always been underpaid and thus easily bought when something really matters to the powers that be. This is their structural position, and most journalists have in some way realized it and done their jobs as best they could under those circumstances. In the attention economy journalists and their “stories” have little claim to the truth—they are just another source clamoring for attention and getting less and less of it. Hence, they can increasingly be ignored.
You’ve skillfully omitted the force of shareholder demand on the very human decisions being made in the tech sector. They may make a few more $Billions at the expense of the entire field of journalism but soon enough search engines and social media will collapse under the weight of their own shit-filled worthlessness. Meanwhile, journalists will survive and will be there to document the end of the current Tech Era. (And, hopefully, the end of this era of unsustainable profiteering.)
Unbelievable. I have no other words for this.
I'd never heard of Newsom until I started working (remote) for a California university.
My coworkers only ever called him Governor Gruesome.
He seems like an even bigger tool than his 2022 Republican opponent was. God help us if he does manage to make himself a presidential candidate.
Agreed… I’ve been losing respect for Newsom by the truckfuls and this is the last wagonload.
I'm sure some perfectly nice people had access to the opaque Stanford-aligned Zuckerberg-controlled CrowdTangle tool. But it was a placeholder solution that postponed this reckoning.
For a decade, it seemed, I thought surely the "research lab" employees would evangelize healthy social media habits & news rituals. With the refreshing exception of Joan Donovan -- who actually gave the public a few tools -- I heard only shaded language from the other elite researchers who ... I guess ... shared their CrowdTangle findings with the White House? When COVID started and I heard no change from the "lab" I joined a data-journalism collaborative, then developed my own software-journalism project which I'm still running.
After CUNY's Craig Newmark School of Journalism Prof Jeff Jarvis followed his supplicant tome "What Would Google Do" with an AI-Hype-timed book tour to announce copyright is obsolete (it's not obsolete) and to claim that book-inspired songs and adapted screenplays couldn't be copyrighted (they are copyrighted) it was time to shift gears. One could reasonably call Jarvising the use of the wandering pronoun "your fault, journalists" "our fault, journalists" to deftly keep the blame on journalism's best practices & practitioners https://buzzmachine.com/2008/10/08/it-is-our-fault/ https://medium.com/whither-news/our-problem-isnt-fake-news-our-problems-are-trust-and-manipulation-5bfbcd716440 while posing as a champion of journalism.
The "deal" Brian describes here gives more money to universities, less to community-facing news production.
After a lab employee took to Wired to pan the California BOT Disclosure law as "inept", the misaligned incentives to kill journalism under the guise of helping universities fight misinformation became more clear. https://www.wired.com/story/law-makes-bots-identify-themselves/
Given that this was inevitable after Canada’s failure (they had to renegotiate with Google and Facebook is still holding out) I get your frustration with this fraught attempt. The big story is buried though: the AI money going to a non-profit which is likely a cutout for the US intel community along the lines of the Stanford Internet Observatory that allows government to manage the news narrative. Keep digging on this!
How would luddites respond? How can you dismantle Google? More reasons to love Substack (for now) and maintaining email lists.
There’s a reason we call him Governor Nuisance around here.
Not to be defending the BS that went on with this situation, but it IS true that technology has changed the playing field of information and infotainment in modern society and it is also true that journalism has always been co-opted by press owners, ad execs, government officials, crisis managers, and big corporations. And, with some notable exceptions, journalists have always been underpaid and thus easily bought when something really matters to the powers that be. This is their structural position, and most journalists have in some way realized it and done their jobs as best they could under those circumstances. In the attention economy journalists and their “stories” have little claim to the truth—they are just another source clamoring for attention and getting less and less of it. Hence, they can increasingly be ignored.
You’ve skillfully omitted the force of shareholder demand on the very human decisions being made in the tech sector. They may make a few more $Billions at the expense of the entire field of journalism but soon enough search engines and social media will collapse under the weight of their own shit-filled worthlessness. Meanwhile, journalists will survive and will be there to document the end of the current Tech Era. (And, hopefully, the end of this era of unsustainable profiteering.)