Month: June 2022

The following is an excerpt from a piece of literary fiction by Jess Zimmerman in Catapult magazine

This final exam will count for 40 percent of your course grade. In the space below, please provide an example of each listed cognitive bias.

Reactance

When I thought you didn’t want me, I would have done anything.

Attentional bias

Everyone on the department website has an official headshot, except you. (I looked. Of course I looked.) Instead you have a snapshot taken near dusk, near winter, your jacket zipped to your jaw. The buttery light from a streetlamp pours molten down your face; you are lifting your chin against a sudden wind that blows your hair back. Who took this picture? You aren’t looking at her. You’re looking off to the left.

A friend came to visit us at the lake recently, and they wanted to go and see a nearby “ghost town” called Balaclava. I had never heard of it before, but it turned out to be just a short drive from our place. So we headed off to Scotch Bush road near Dacre and there it was — not technically a ghost town, I don’t think, since there are still people living there. But it does have a great old abandoned lumber mill that dates back to the 1850s or so (although much of it was apparently destroyed by fire and rebuilt in the 1930s).

Behind the lumber mill is a tall, rusted tower that sits on a foundation of river rocks, with the remains of a wooden chute leading to the mill. This was apparently the first sawdust furnace in Ontario, and it was reportedly built because the owner of a grist mill down the river from the Balaclava mill sued the owner in 1911, claiming the sawdust being dumped into the river was fouling up his grist works. According to some reports, this was also the first environmental lawsuit in Ontario.

Continue reading “The ghost towns of Balaclava and Newfoundout”

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

On June 9, Keach Hagey and Alexandra Bruell—two Wall Street Journal reporters who cover the major digital platforms—reported that Facebook, a subsidiary of Meta Platforms, was “re-examining its commitment to paying for news,” according to several unnamed sources who were described as being familiar with Facebook’s plans. The potential loss of those payments, the Journal reporters wrote, was “prompting some news organizations to prepare for a potential revenue shortfall of tens of millions of dollars.” The Journal story echoed a report published in May by The Information, a subscription-only site that covers technology; in that piece, reporters Sylvia Varnham O’Regan and Jessica Toonkel said Meta was “considering reducing the money it gives news organizations as it reevaluates the partnerships it struck over the past few years,” and that this reevaluation was part of a rethinking of “the value of including news in its flagship Facebook app.”

Meta wouldn’t comment to either the Journal or The Information, and a spokesperson told CJR the company “doesn’t comment on speculation.” But the loss of payments from Meta could have a noticeable impact for some outlets. According to the Journal report, for the past two years—since the original payment deals were announced in 2019— Meta has paid the Washington Post more than $15 million per year, the New York Times over $20 million per year, and the Journal more than $10 million per year (the payments to the Journal are part of a broader deal with Dow Jones, the newspaper’s parent, which is said to be worth more than $20 million per year). The deals, which are expected to expire this year, were part of a broader system of payments Meta made to a number of news outlets, including Bloomberg, ABC News, USA Today, Business Insider, and the right-wing news site Breitbart News. Smaller deals were typically for $3 million or less, the Journal said.

The payments were announced as part of the launch of the “News tab,” a dedicated section of the Facebook app where readers can find news from the outlets that partnered with Meta (higher payments were made to those with paywalls, according to a number of reports). The launch was a high-profile affair, including a one-on-one interview between Robert Thomson, CEO of News Corp.—parent company of Dow Jones and the Journal—and Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta. Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia, wrote for CJR that the meeting was like “a Camp David for peace between the most truculent old media empire and one of its most noxious disruptors,” and wondered how much it had cost for News Corp. to forget about its long-standing opposition to Facebook’s media strategy. The event was “a publicity coup for Facebook; it tamed the biggest beast in the journalism jungle,” Bell wrote.

Bell is not the only media industry observer to note that Facebook’s payments to media outlets have felt more like a marketing ploy than a sign of a deep and abiding commitment to journalism. “The correct way to view Google and Facebook’s actions, I believe, is through the lens of PR,” wrote Josh Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab, a year or so after the launch of the News tab, when Google announced something very similar. “The troubles of the news business are a major PR problem for these companies, who — however fair they or anyone else thinks it is — get blamed for its ills.” The move to pay media companies did seem like a rather dramatic shift in Facebook’s viewpoint: a little over a year before the launch of the News tab, Zuckerberg seemed to be skeptical that paying the media for content was something worth doing. “I’m not sure that makes sense,” he told Vox, during an interview in 2018, after being asked about a proposal from Rupert Murdoch that the social network should pay “carriage fees” for news content.

As Benton and others have noted, the decision to pay publishers—after years of refusing to do so, despite repeated complaints—came amid rising pressure, from legislators in multiple jurisdictions, aimed at getting Google and Facebook to compensate the media industry for the harms allegedly done to it by the digital platforms’ control of online advertising. That kind of pressure has been a fairly constant drumbeat in the industry for the past 15 years or so, after publishers in Spain, France, and Germany started pushing for legislation that would compel Google to pay for reusing content from news sites. A desire to quell this kind of legislation was part of why Google launched what became its Google News Initiative, in which it committed to pay publishers $300 million for training, internships, and other partnership arrangements. Facebook made similar kinds of commitments with its Facebook Journalism Project, which launched in 2017.

The pressure on Google and Facebook to pay publishers ramped up with the passing of legislation in Australia in 2021, which forced platforms to sign licensing deals with media outlets or face arbitration. Both companies eventually signed a number of deals with publishers (although there was criticism that smaller outlets were left out), and other countries such as Canada and the UK are expected to pass similar laws soon. According to the Journal, Zuckerberg has been “disappointed” by these regulatory efforts, which have reportedly “damped [his] enthusiasm for making news a bigger part of Facebook’s offerings.” And Meta has apparently noticed that “fewer people have been clicking on links to news articles since President Donald Trump left office,” according to The Information. The company also appears to be much more focused on promoting short-form video—as a way of competing with TikTok, the popular video-sharing platform—than appeasing publishers, which could leave even large media players out in the cold.

Here’s more on Facebook:

• The irony: In 2018, I wrote for CJR about how Google and Facebook had become the two largest funders of media and journalism in the world, and the risks of depending on them as a source of revenue. “The irony is hard to miss,” I wrote. “The dismantling of the traditional advertising model—largely at the hands of the social networks, which have siphoned away the majority of industry ad revenue—has left many media companies and journalistic institutions in desperate need of a lifeline. Google and Facebook, meanwhile, are happy to oblige, flush with cash from their ongoing dominance of the digital ad market.”

• Loss of trust: When the News tab was announced, Josh Constine of TechCrunch wrote that Facebook shouldn’t be trusted. “Are we really doing this again?” he asked. “After the pivot to video. After Instant Articles. After news was deleted from the News Feed. Once more, Facebook dangles extra traffic, and journalism outlets leap through its hoop and into its cage.” Publishers, Constine argued, should have learned the risks of relying on the platforms. “When you build on someone else’s land, don’t be surprised when you’re bulldozed. And really, given Facebook’s flawless track record of pulling the rug out from under publishers, no one should be surprised.”

• Amplification: New research indicates that changes to the Facebook recommendation algorithm amplified the reach of Republican posts and content during the first half of 2019. “We conclude that it seems possible that changes in how Facebook rated content led to a doubling of the total shares of local Republican party posts compared to local Democratic party posts in the first half of 2019 even though Democratic parties posted more often during this period,” the scientists who conducted the research wrote. “The fact that private companies can so easily control the political information flow for millions of Americans raises clear questions for the state of democracy.”

• Failure to detect: Facebook failed to detect violent hate speech in advertisements submitted to the platform by the non-profit groups Global Witness and Foxglove, the Guardian reported. “The hateful messages focused on Ethiopia, where internal documents obtained by whistleblower Frances Haugen showed that Facebook’s ineffective moderation is fanning ethnic violence”, as she said in her 2021 congressional testimony,” the paper wrote. In March, Global Witness ran a similar test with hate speech in advertisements in Myanmar, which Facebook also reportedly failed to detect.

Other notable stories:

• A fisherman confessed that he helped kill Dom Phillips, a freelance reporter for The Guardian, and Bruno Araújo Pereira, a former government official who worked in the area to combat illegal fishing and mining, according to a report from the New York Times. “It was a grim breakthrough in the 10-day search for the missing men deep in the Amazon that has transfixed Brazil and provoked international outrage,” the paper reported. The two men disappeared on June 5, while traveling on the Itaquaí River in a remote area of the Amazon, near the borders with Peru and Colombia. Reuters, meanwhile, reported that the fisherman and his brother both confessed to killing Phillips and Pereira.

• Brazil is “on the brink of a disinformation disaster,” writes Julia Angwin, the co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Markup, a data-driven research organization. The country goes to the polls to elect a president in October, she says, and it “appears to be headed in the same contentious direction as the U.S. presidential election of 2020. Even before voting has begun, the far-right incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro, has already started talking about voting irregularities—raising concerns that he might not concede defeat should he lose.” Bolsonaro has also repeatedly brought up the election of Joe Biden in the United States, suggesting that votes were rigged in some way.

• First Draft News, a research organization that trains journalists to recognize and handle misinformation and disinformation, is shutting down, according to a post from co-founder Claire Wardle. But most of the operation is moving to Brown University to become part of the recently launched Information Futures Lab, an initiative from Brown’s School of Public Health. First Draft started as a nonprofit coalition in 2015, Wardle writes, and since then has trained more than 10,000 journalists and other professionals, and has helped work on misinformation projects as part of almost 20 elections in various countries.

• Covering Climate Now, a partnership that CJR and The Nation created in 2019, announced the winners of the Covering Climate Now Journalism Awards on Wednesday, the second year that the awards have been handed out. The list of winners includes journalists at The Guardian, Agence France-Presse, Al Jazeera English, PBS, the Charleston, S.C., Post and Courier, the Los Angeles Times, and WGBH-PRX. Justin Worland, senior correspondent for Time, was named Climate Journalist of the Year.

• The Los Angeles Times profiled the Martinez brothers, crusading journalists from El Salvador who have been forced to do their work from Mexico because they fear their reporting on the country’s president, Nayib Bukele, could get them arrested. “Bukele has built a sprawling state-run media machine that is guided by daily opinion polling while at the same time surveilling independent journalists with spyware and drones, punishing government officials for leaking information, and lobbing tax fraud and money-laundering accusations at El Faro, the investigative news site where the Martínez brothers work,” the Times reported. In April, Bukele approved a law that threatens any journalist who reports on gangs with up to 15 years in prison.

• Posting content about the recent defamation trial involving actors Johnny Depp and Amber Heard led to dramatic increases in revenue for YouTube creators, Business Insider reported. According to Playboard, a company that tracks revenue for leading YouTube channels, a former district attorney who posted videos about the trial made close to $170,000 between April and June, and that was after YouTube took its 30 percent share of the channel’s revenue. Emily Baker told Business Insider that her livestream during the announcement of the verdict brought in 370,000 concurrent viewers, and that she makes far more creating YouTube content than she ever did as an attorney.

• Factwire, an independent news entity in Hong Kong, announced that it is closing, Variety reported. Although the outlet didn’t cite any specific reason for the closure, some observers noted that it is the fourth independent news organization to close its doors in the past year, and that this is likely a result of a crackdown on press freedom by the Chinese government. Factwire, which specialized in investigative reporting, was established in 2015 using funds raised by a crowdfunding campaign.

• Check My Ads, an organization that tries to pressure advertisers who sponsor right-wing content, has started a new campaign aimed at ads that run on Fox News, Gizmodo reported. But in contrast to other such attempts, the current campaign is focused on trying to get ad networks and ad exchanges to drop Fox as a client. “We’re kicking off by focusing on many of the same exchanges we previously contacted over their ties to various insurrectionists,” Claire Atkin, one of the groups’ co-founders, told Gizmodo. “She noted that while some of the exchanges—Yahoo is among the group’s targets—cut off ad-dollar access to digital properties from Steve Bannon, they remain tethered to Fox News’s site.”

Max Read, a former editor-in-chief of Gawker, writes a newsletter called Read Max, and in one of his latest editions he talks about a book he read and reviewed, called “Speculative Communities: Living With Uncertainty in a Financialized World,” by a London-based sociologist named Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou. It’s about more than just crypto, but it explains a lot about the rise of that kind of niche community:

Where prediction once reigned, speculation now dominates. You can see this at the most literal level in the rise of gig-platform apps like Uber, where the once-simple acts of hailing or driving a cab become adventures in speculation—wagers on whether the price of a ride will rise or fall in the next five minutes—but you can also see it on a discursive level in social media, where users stake out speculative positions (called “takes”) on volatile reputational marketplaces. You even see it, Komporozos-Athanasiou argues, in the success of “populist” politicians and initiatives from the Greek bailout referendum to Brexit to Trump, votes for which can be understood as speculative wagers on “possible, yet uncertain, outcomes”

[H]omo economicus is an isolated individual, while homo speculans, in Komporozos-Athanasiou’s formulation, is a member of a “speculative community.” The delegitimation of neoliberal reason not only increases volatility, it also undermines the previous regime’s insistence on atomized individuals and family units. “Struggles of speculation and insurance,” then, “are experienced more intensely but also more collectively.” Here Speculative Communities draws on Benedict Anderson’s famous study of the origins of nationalism, Imagined Communities, which argued that the collapse of anciens régimes around the world and the rise of print-media capitalism in the wake of the industrial revolution created new uncertainties around which the “imagined communities” of nationalism could coalesce.

This is the only slightly tongue-in-cheek thesis of Allegra Rosenberg, writing in Ryan Broderick’s excellent “Garbage Day” newsletter. In a section of the newsletter, Allegra talks about reading and trying to memorize Hamlet’s soliloquy, how it reminds her both of Twitter and of Derrida, and of a recent edition of Charlie Warzel’s Galaxy Brain newsletter in which he discusses theories of contemporary society as posed by L.M. Sacasas:

In Hamlet’s keen analysis from inside his own cloud of hesitation, it is the fear of the unknown which prevents him or anyone from taking the craved-for plunge into the sweet release of death. It makes us rather bear the ills we have / than fly to those we know not of. He understood how stuckness self-perpetuates. The equally frustrating presentness perpetuates, too, in Sacasas’ contemporary formulation: when everything is commentary, what else is there to comment on, but prior commentary?

He says: “We’re not building toward new ideas; we’re relating things that just happened to other things that happened before that” — and thus the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought. The internet is a forest of inscriptions, so dense that we are far too caught up in infinite fractal brambles of things said and done to actually make any real choices, and/or to understand our situation insofar as we can affect it. 

This got me thinking about Jacques Derrida (I know…). In Archive Fever, a later work dealing with the looming digital age, he speaks about how the titular fever — what he identifies as a death or destruction drive — allows in itself for the ongoing existence of the archive: “There would indeed be no archive desire without the radical finitude, without the possibility of a forgetfulness which does not limit itself to repression.” Basically the only reason we’re stuck in the “doom loop” of forever talking about the past, as Warzel puts it, is because the internet contains both the constant production of the past as well as an intense feeling of ephemerality.

The 1895 short film “Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat” is probably one of the most famous — and the earliest — film clips in history. It was directed and produced by Auguste and Louis Lumière, brothers who were among the first to create such films. The 50-second silent movie shows a train pulled by a steam locomotive into the gare de La Ciotat, the train station in a French southern coastal town near Marseille. It consists of one continuous real-time shot. There were rumors that when it was first shown, the audience screamed and some fled from their seats, convinced a real train was coming at them. But many film historians doubt that this actually happened.

In 2020, YouTuber Denis Shiryaev wanted to update the look of the clip, so — with the help of several neural networks — he upscaled the clip to 4K resolution and 60 FPS

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

On April 11, The Atlantic published an essay by Jonathan Haidt entitled Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid. In the piece, Haidt—a social psychologist at the New York University Stern School of Business, and the co-author of a book called The Coddling of the American Mind—argued that social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have constructed a modern-day tower of Babel. The societal chaos that these kinds of services have unleashed, Haidt wrote, have “dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together.” The arguments made in the piece were similar to an earlier Atlantic essay by Haidt and Tobias Rose-Stockwell, about the “dark psychology” of social networks, and how they have created a world in which “networks of partisans co-create worldviews that can become more and more extreme, disinformation campaigns flourish [and] violent ideologies lure recruits.”

Haidt’s essay was the latest in a long series of research papers and articles on the ills of social media, and specifically the idea that services such as Facebook and Twitter have fractured, polarized, and enraged Americans, because of the way recommendation and targeting algorithms work. Concepts such as the “filter bubble,” the “echo chamber,” and the idea that social networks can “radicalize” otherwise normal users—turning them into right-wing conspiracy theorists—have become commonplace. “Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly,” when services such as Facebook and Twitter became widespread, Haidt argued in his most recent essay. “We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past. The newly tweaked platforms were almost perfectly designed to bring out our most moralistic and least reflective selves. The volume of outrage was shocking.”

As repetitive as some of Haidt’s arguments about social media were, his Atlantic essay did introduce something relatively new to the field. After some criticism of his conclusions, and some of the research he relied on for his piece, Haidt and Chris Bail—a professor of sociology and public policy at Duke University, where he directs the Polarization Lab—created a collaborative Google document they titled Social Media and Political Dysfunction: A Collaborative Review. The idea behind it, the two men explained in a preface, was to collect research that might help to shed light on the question: “Is social media a major contributor to the rise of political dysfunction seen in the USA and some other democracies?” (This is the third such collaborative document Haidt has created to track research on related topics; he created two with Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology from San Diego State University—one that collects research related to adolescent mood disorders, and one that does so for social media and mental health.)

Continue reading “Have the dangers of social media been overstated?”

From Heather Havrilesky’s excellent newsletter:

“I’m not stooping to lick mud puddles anymore. I worship at the temple of everything now, updrafts of wet oak tree and bruised lip and salty oyster shell, hints of sheer rock cliff and band director and broken typewriter and my dad’s sad stories about the Great Flood, the one that swept everything away, the one that took everything, the kitchen table and the chicken coop and the tattered books, the crocheted blankets and the boxes of love letters, the pickled cabbage, the black rosary beads, the love worn chair, the long exhale of smoke across the garden at twilight, the years of waiting, of saying too little, of backing away slowly, of disappearing for good, everything.”

This fascinating estate was right across the street from our Airbnb in the tiny mountain town of Palmer Lake, Colorado. According to what I’ve been able to find out online, it’s called the Estemere Mansion, and it was built in 1887 by a dentist from Baltimore named William Finley Thompson. He was hoping that the Palmer Lake area would become a tourist destination, and that people would be looking for luxurious estates, so he built a 7.000 square-foot mansion with 18 rooms — including eleven bedrooms — and six fireplaces, on an estate that includes a large garden, a carriage house and a chapel. He eventually went bankrupt and moved back to the Baltimore area.

In 1898, Eben Smith, who made his fortune in gold milling, bought the estate for $5,000. It was primarily a residence, though during the 1920s and ’30s it was also the site of a number of schools, including one for the underprivileged students and one for children with special needs. Roger and Kim Ward bought the property in 1998, and it underwent significant renovations, including the addition of structural support, new carpeting and flooring, a new gas furnace, and an entrance into the tower. The Wards put the estate up for sale in 2020 for $2.5 million, after Kim started suffering from dementia, but I haven’t been able to find out whether it sold or not, and if so to whom.

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court issued an order blocking a Texas law that would prevent large social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube from removing content, except in extreme cases (content that involves the sexual exploitation of children, criminal activity, or threats of violence.) The order was brief, because it was triggered by an emergency application from two organizations opposed to the law. NetChoice, a coalition of online service companies, and the Computer & Communications Industry Association—a group whose members include Google, Facebook, and Twitter—asked the Supreme Court for an emergency decision because they argued that the law is “an unprecedented assault on the editorial discretion of private websites” and also a breach of the platforms’ First Amendment rights.

Even as it issued the order, however, the Supreme Court noted that the case is still before an appeals court in Texas, and that the issues at the center of the case are so critical that they will likely need to be considered at length by the Supreme Court at some point. “This application concerns issues of great importance that will plainly merit this Court’s review,” the decision states. In a dissenting opinion issued as part of the Supreme Court’s decision, Justice Alito said social media platforms have “transformed the way people communicate with each other,” but that “it is not at all obvious how our existing precedents, which predate the age of the internet, should apply.” To some, this seemed to open the door to a challenge to the platforms’ First Amendment rights.

Last week, meanwhile, an appeals court in Florida blocked most of the provisions in a similar state law that would have prevented the platforms from removing accounts belonging to politicians. In its decision, the court stated that “it is substantially likely that social-media companies—even the biggest ones—are private actors whose rights the First Amendment protects [and] that their so-called content-moderation decisions constitute protected exercises of editorial judgment.” Specifically, the court said that prohibiting companies from removing content was not allowed, but provisions in the law that require the platforms to provide clear standards for content and allow users to access their data likely don’t violate the First Amendment and can be implemented.

Continue reading “The courts, the platforms, and regulating speech”