Elon Musk: Always A Douche

[Jacob]

There's also the thing that one of the reasons disinformation and conspiracy theory is so lucrative is that they make money from Google advertising.

[Sheilbh]

Yeah - although I think their bigger impact in that area is the wipe out of publisher revenue for big media organisations as much, if not more than the ability of niche sites to monetise their content.

As I say advertising on websites is the core of the world's biggest businesses - and very, very little of that is making its way to the companies that are producing the content people want to read.

[OttoVonBismarck]

In re the checkmark, there are a few issues.

For one, the main reason Twitter developed the checkmark was actually to head off litigation.

By creating a verified status, Twitter has basically an argument that anyone who is not verified, you don't really know that it is really that person. They also will not allow anyone to impersonate a real person unless it is a form of parody. For example I can have @DumbDonaldTrump as a parody account that mocks Trump for being stupid. I cannot have a Donald Trump account where I put forth credible and flagrant claims that I am the real Donald Trump. Further, before he was banned, the actual real Donald Trump could get verified so other people would know it was the real Donald Trump.

Twitter came up with this system to avoid getting sued by famous people being impersonated on their platform. It isn't a perfect liability shield, but my understanding has always been that was the core reason they created it.

Ancillary reasons are helping to promote people who generate lots of Twitter views, and even more ancillary, helping sort out potential disinformation and things of that nature.

If they take the blue checkmark away from a famous person who does not want to pony up, they are still going to have to maintain the other parts of the system--protecting that person against impersonation, or they open themselves up to liability. Additionally right now they have several blue checkmark people (like for example some Russian and Iranian government officials, among many others of that ilk) for whom it would be illegal for Twitter to charge money to--because they cannot legally accept payments from those people because they are under legal sanction.

[crazy canuck]

Yeah - although I think their bigger impact in that area is the wipe out of publisher revenue for big media organisations as much, if not more than the ability of niche sites to monetise their content.

As I say advertising on websites is the core of the world's biggest businesses - and very, very little of that is making its way to the companies that are producing the content people want to read.

I'm not sure about the "want" to read part of your post.  Instead dubious content gets supported because numbers of people want to read it.


marketplace of ideas?

[Grey Fox]

1. Get an audience
2. Monetise that audience
3. Keep the audience engaged
4. Untold amount of profit by peddling Google ads for weight loss pills.

[Sheilbh]

I'm not sure about the "want" to read part of you post.  Instead dubious content gets supported because numbers of people want to read it.

marketplace of ideas?

Sure but the vast majority of internet traffic is to the mainstream media - there will always be people who want to and do read dubious content. I don't think the big issue is the rise of bad content, I think it's the decline of good content (with the exception of Facebook - where I think there are bigger issues on this).

Partly that's a structural change. Media companies have too much data and know what readers are interested in. Back in the day when you were just a newspaper or an organised news show you didn't really know which bits people were reading. You could sneak in the protein of reporting with the carbs of opinion pieces - not everyone's going to read, say, an Industrial Relations Correspondent (a now extinct category in the UK) or a report from Tigray, but it was there and you had to turn the page. Some people would pause and read it. Where I am, if all they wanted to do was increase their readership it would be 100% screeds about Brexit and the Tories because that's what people click to straight away. The challenge is getting people to click on to the deeply reported piece or the fact heavy piece on, say, climate that doesn't meet someone's priors. The other thing the data highlights is exactly how much certain bits of the media are basically subsidising what I'd consider the valuable bits - reporters around the country and the world doing stories. When budget decisions are made there is always a desire to protect that but it's a more challenging issue when you can quantify it.

The other side is the type of content. So the dubious sites have cheap overhead because basically what they're doing is reporting on online rumours and "just raising questions". That's incredibly cheap - you need a laptop and an internet connection. It is vastly more expensive to actually report on issues - even just in time cost of calling round for comments on a press release. Again the financial pressure on the mainstream media has pushed it more into the type of content that dubious sites are spreading. Far too many articles are about someone saying something somewhere on the internet and that being described as "controversy over", "x clap back", "people are discussing" (all incredibly passive reports because reporting in the active would undermine the report: "Twitter rando with 134 followers said something racist"). I think the problem with that is that if the content is similar in that way, you're training your readers to read a certain sort of content. Frankly if they get into that, they might as well go to the full fat version.

I don't think the problem is lots of bad opinions or fake facts, I think it's what the internet has done structurally to the mainstream media. I don't think relying on the platforms to counter disinformation or misinformation will solve anything - instead it will reinforce the problems we have by further strengthening the position of the platforms at the heart of everything despite not being the organisations doing reporting, producing content or making editorial decisions. Making them pay more to the publishers, I think, would help more.

Australia will be an interesting case study because they pushed that law that basically required Google and Facebook to pay news publishers. They threatened to pull out of that market and threw a tantrum but then didn't. Australia's media is overwhelmingly dominated by Murdoch companies - but that group of companies alone saw "nine figure increases" in their revenue directly because of that law. Some of that will go into dividends or whatever, but a chunk is now being invested in increasing reporting muscle and newsroom costs. It might, also, allow more news sites to eschew a paywall as their only path to profitability - which I think is important. The UK has relatively big open sites like the BBC and the Guardian as well as Mail Online. But if you're a casual news consumer in the US lots of the big "reputable" sites (NYT/Washington Post etc) are behind really aggressive paywalls for very good commercial reasons but I think that's also a challenge for the public discourse and I think a question for a democratic society of news becoming a thing for people who can afford not just to buy a paper but sign up for a subscription model.

Edit: TLDR - I don't think it's a demand issue, I think it's a supply issue.

[Syt]

[mongers]

...snip

Brilliant post, thanks Syt.

[Jacob]

My favourite take was something like "world richest man says 'pay me $96/month to protect free speech a fight inequality"

[crazy canuck]

I'm not sure about the "want" to read part of you post.  Instead dubious content gets supported because numbers of people want to read it.

marketplace of ideas?

Sure but the vast majority of internet traffic is to the mainstream media - there will always be people who want to and do read dubious content. I don't think the big issue is the rise of bad content, I think it's the decline of good content (with the exception of Facebook - where I think there are bigger issues on this).

Partly that's a structural change. Media companies have too much data and know what readers are interested in. Back in the day when you were just a newspaper or an organised news show you didn't really know which bits people were reading. You could sneak in the protein of reporting with the carbs of opinion pieces - not everyone's going to read, say, an Industrial Relations Correspondent (a now extinct category in the UK) or a report from Tigray, but it was there and you had to turn the page. Some people would pause and read it. Where I am, if all they wanted to do was increase their readership it would be 100% screeds about Brexit and the Tories because that's what people click to straight away. The challenge is getting people to click on to the deeply reported piece or the fact heavy piece on, say, climate that doesn't meet someone's priors. The other thing the data highlights is exactly how much certain bits of the media are basically subsidising what I'd consider the valuable bits - reporters around the country and the world doing stories. When budget decisions are made there is always a desire to protect that but it's a more challenging issue when you can quantify it.

The other side is the type of content. So the dubious sites have cheap overhead because basically what they're doing is reporting on online rumours and "just raising questions". That's incredibly cheap - you need a laptop and an internet connection. It is vastly more expensive to actually report on issues - even just in time cost of calling round for comments on a press release. Again the financial pressure on the mainstream media has pushed it more into the type of content that dubious sites are spreading. Far too many articles are about someone saying something somewhere on the internet and that being described as "controversy over", "x clap back", "people are discussing" (all incredibly passive reports because reporting in the active would undermine the report: "Twitter rando with 134 followers said something racist"). I think the problem with that is that if the content is similar in that way, you're training your readers to read a certain sort of content. Frankly if they get into that, they might as well go to the full fat version.

I don't think the problem is lots of bad opinions or fake facts, I think it's what the internet has done structurally to the mainstream media. I don't think relying on the platforms to counter disinformation or misinformation will solve anything - instead it will reinforce the problems we have by further strengthening the position of the platforms at the heart of everything despite not being the organisations doing reporting, producing content or making editorial decisions. Making them pay more to the publishers, I think, would help more.

Australia will be an interesting case study because they pushed that law that basically required Google and Facebook to pay news publishers. They threatened to pull out of that market and threw a tantrum but then didn't. Australia's media is overwhelmingly dominated by Murdoch companies - but that group of companies alone saw "nine figure increases" in their revenue directly because of that law. Some of that will go into dividends or whatever, but a chunk is now being invested in increasing reporting muscle and newsroom costs. It might, also, allow more news sites to eschew a paywall as their only path to profitability - which I think is important. The UK has relatively big open sites like the BBC and the Guardian as well as Mail Online. But if you're a casual news consumer in the US lots of the big "reputable" sites (NYT/Washington Post etc) are behind really aggressive paywalls for very good commercial reasons but I think that's also a challenge for the public discourse and I think a question for a democratic society of news becoming a thing for people who can afford not just to buy a paper but sign up for a subscription model.

Edit: TLDR - I don't think it's a demand issue, I think it's a supply issue.

Media consumption habits are not as clear cut as you propose.  They vary across age groups and countries.  The US being a particular outlier - which is a significant part of their problem.

You might find this to be an interesting read

https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2022/dnr-executive-summary

[OttoVonBismarck]

FWIW I think most Americans who get news from social media are getting it from Facebook, not Twitter. Facebook serves up traditional news article copied from various sources to a pretty entrenched audience of boomers. Twitter does link lots of news articles, but is a noisy platform that AFAICT is less utilized by older generations and has less engagement than Facebook in general, and less of an audience.

Facebook has 240m American users, Twitter has 7 million American users.

[Sheilbh]

FWIW I think most Americans who get news from social media are getting it from Facebook, not Twitter. Facebook serves up traditional news article copied from various sources to a pretty entrenched audience of boomers. Twitter does link lots of news articles, but is a noisy platform that AFAICT is less utilized by older generations and has less engagement than Facebook in general, and less of an audience.

Facebook has 240m American users, Twitter has 7 million American users.

Yeah - Facebook is vastly more relevant. Outside of the US especially when you add WhatsApp which is basically used for mass chain letters in some countries/communities.

As you say, Facebook also looks more like the average voter. In the UK there's been numerous studies that Twitter is vastly more left-wing than average and far younger and more college educated too (which makes sense given that age and education are the big divides in recent elections here). But the same studies show Facebook is more right wing than average, used by older people and less college educated.

I always remember the point that while Twitter was excited about the potential of Corbyn's 2017 (relative) success and was this a breakthrough for the left, on Facebook the most shared election memes and content by an order of magnitude were Labour attacking Theresa May's plan to have a free vote on fox hunting - which is very UK boomer content. That was Labour's most successful message on social media in years so perhaps not unrelated to their performance).

Media consumption habits are not as clear cut as you propose.  They vary across age groups and countries.  The US being a particular outlier - which is a significant part of their problem.

You might find this to be an interesting read

I don't think any of that really goes against what I've said. Every big media company is a digital company with an app and where there social media plans on any big stories, promoting your story on social media is part of the job for a journalist so getting news from social media or online includes the mainstream media. Again, that stuff costs money.

I think there's possibly a bit of dot-joining they could do - for example there seems to be a link between young people trusting the media least and therfore least likely to have a subscription. I think it's the other way round young people (lowest paid, in the rental market, most exposed to "flexible" contracts) are least likely to have (or be able to afford) subscriptions - therefore they are least likely to trust the media. Media consumption is about habit forming and I'm not sure the current model of walled gardens, driven by commercial imperatives, is good for the sector or public discourse in the long-run.

[The Minsky Moment]

The fact that more people rely on Facebook is hardly reassuring, given that we have a 13,000+ post thread about the inane stuff that people circulate on FB.

[Zanza]

We can just hope that Zuckerberg's delusional Metaverse will eventually ruin Facebook. 

[Grey Fox]

Looks like Languish will survive the Social Media era. That's a fun thing to think about.