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Note: This is something I originally wrote for the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I’m the chief digital writer

For many people, YouTube is a place to kill time by watching sailing videos, or to pick up tips on how to train their dog, or change a car headlight. But the Google-owned video service also has a darker side, according to a number of news articles, including one from the New York Times last year. Some users, these stories say, start out looking at innocuous videos, but get pushed in the direction of more and more radical, inflammatory or even outright fake content. Those pushes come from YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, which some argue has turned the service into a “radicalization engine.” Does the network and the software that powers its video suggestions actually turn otherwise normal users into consumers of far-right conspiracy theories and other radical content, and if so what should be done about it?

Those are some of the questions we at CJR wanted to address, so we used our Galley discussion platform to convene a virtual panel of experts in what some call “automated propaganda,” including Dipayan Ghosh of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, New York Times columnist Kevin Roose — who wrote last year’s Times piece on YouTube radicalization — as well as Brazilian researcher Virgilio Almeida, Aviv Ovadya of the Thoughtful Technology Project, former YouTube programmer Guillaume Chaslot, and Harvard misinformation researcher Joan Donovan. One trigger for this discussion was a research paper published recently that not only said YouTube is not a radicalization engine, but argued that its software actually accomplishes the opposite, by suggesting videos that push users in the direction of mainstream content. As part of our virtual Galley panel, we spoke to a co-author of that paper, Mark Ledwich.

In Twitter posts and on Medium, Ledwich took direct aim at the New York Times and Roose for perpetuating what he called the myth of YouTube algorithmic radicalization. In reality, he said, this theory showed that “old media titans, presenting themselves as non-partisan and authoritative, are in fact trapped in echo chambers of their own creation, and are no more incentivized to report the truth than YouTube grifters.” One of the main criticisms of the paper — which came from others in the field such as Arvind Narayanan of Princeton — was that the research was based on anonymized data, meaning none of the recommendations were personalized, the way they were in the New York Times piece (which used personal account data provided by the subject of the story). In his Galley interview, Ledwich pointed out that much of the research that others have used to support the radicalization theory is also based on anonymized data, in part because personalized data is so difficult to come by.

Continue reading “The YouTube “radicalization engine” debate continues”

A renowned Canadian poet who had worked with the man convicted of killing an Indigenous woman 25 years ago says he won’t read the killer’s poetry at an upcoming University of Regina event amidst calls for it to be cancelled. George Elliott Clarke said earlier this week that he wasn’t ruling out reading the work of Steven Kummerfield, who was convicted of manslaughter in the beating death of Pamela George in 1995. Clarke had previously edited poetry by Kummerfield, who has changed his name to Stephen Brown.

Source: Canadian poet George Elliott Clarke won’t read convicted killer’s poetry at MMIWG event | CBC News

This is a fascinating and disturbing story. In case you don’t already know about it (as I didn’t until recently), Steven Kummerfield and his university friend Alex Ternowetsky killed Pamela George by beating her to death and leaving her in a ditch outside Regina in 1995 after one or both of them had sex with her. George was a young mother of two who sometimes worked as a prostitute to support her family.

Kummerfield and Ternowetsky, meanwhile, were both young white men from well-off families in Saskatchewan, families who helped them financially and in other ways. According to one report from the trial, Kummerfield told his mother about what he had done the day after it happened, and she told him to call in to CrimeStoppers with a false tip, and then washed the clothes he was wearing that night. According to testimony from a friend, both men bragged that they had “killed a chick” and Ternowetsky said she deserved it because “she was an Indian.”

Continue reading “What happens when a convicted killer becomes a celebrated poet?”

Note: This is something I originally wrote for the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I’m the chief digital writer

The holiday season and the arrival of a new year are often cause for reflection and soul-searching. Whether any of the senior management at the New York Times spent the holidays engaged in this kind of activity is unknown, but many critics have made it abundantly clear that they would like them to, if only to explain why the newspaper allows op-ed columnist Bret Stephens to write the things he does. As most people were winding down their work week and preparing to turn out the lights on 2019, Stephens chose to lob a hand grenade into the Twitter-sphere with a column entitled The Secrets of Jewish Genius. In it, the Times columnist posed — and then tried to answer — the question of why there have been so many noteworthy Jewish scientists and leading thinkers like Einstein. As he put it: “How is it that a people who never amounted even to one-third of 1 percent of the world’s population contributed so seminally to so many of its most pathbreaking ideas and innovations?”

In the end, Stephens comes to the conclusion that Jewish genius “operates differently” from the intelligence displayed by others. It is, he says, “prone to question the premise and rethink the concept; to ask why (or why not?) as often as how; to see the absurd in the mundane and the sublime in the absurd. These differences, according to Stephens, stem from cultural factors, as well as a focus on questioning authority. But those ideas weren’t what triggered a multi-day backlash against Stephens or the Times (although many argued they were also wrong-headed). What drove the wave of criticism was that in the course of making this argument, Stephens cited a paper he said supported the theory that Ashkenazi Jews (i.e., those with a primarily European background) have higher IQs than the average population. Within hours of the column being posted, multiple people had pointed out that one of the co-authors of the paper had expressed racist views and had ties to white supremacist organizations, and that the journal the paper was published in was formerly known as Eugenics Review.

On Sunday the 30th, two days after the column originally appeared, the Twitter account for the Times opinion section announced that the piece had “been edited to remove a reference to a paper widely disputed as advancing a racist hypothesis.” The column was also updated with a long editor’s note (at the top of the piece, rather than at the bottom, as some notes often are), which pointed out that the reference to the paper had been removed and why. The note went on to say that “Mr. Stephens was not endorsing the study or its authors’ views, but it was a mistake to cite it uncritically” and admitted that the effect of doing so was to “leave an impression with many readers that Mr. Stephens was arguing that Jews are genetically superior [but] that was not his intent. The column was also edited to remove all references to Ashkenazi Jews, something that was a central part of Stephens’ argument in the original column, but these removals weren’t mentioned in the editor’s note.

Continue reading “The ongoing dilemma that is Times columnist Bret Stephens”

Note: This is something I originally wrote for the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I’m the chief digital writer

Everyone keeps on saying how historic it is to have an impeachment vote against a sitting US president, and there’s no question it fits the technical definition, since it has only happened twice before, and Trump’s impeachment will undoubtedly go down in history. And yet, the vote in the House on Wednesday — much like everything else that has led up to this point — didn’t feel like history in the making, it felt like a circus sideshow. One in which the facts no longer matter, for one side of the debate at least; all that matters is to be seen waving the flag and supporting the “duly elected” president, dropping code words like Biden and Hillary Clinton, and muttering darkly about the “deep state” and a Ukrainian Crowdstrike server that doesn’t exist. There’s no such thing as a good-faith disagreement about the severity of certain actions by the president, just a wholesale denial of all the pertinent facts. The main approach seems to be to repeat untruths over and over in the hope that, if they don’t convince anyone, at least they will muddy the waters a little.

In this fictional universe — as represented in Trump’s unhinged six-page letter to Nancy Pelosi — there were no crimes or misdemeanors, just a “perfect” conversation with the Ukrainian president, no quid pro quo, etc. But wholesale denial of the facts isn’t even the worst of it. According to Playboy correspondent Brian Karem, a White House source said one theory inside the administration is that “Hillary Clinton lost the election with the aid of Russian hacking so the Democrats could then impeach Trump” (that one drew an animated reaction from Clinton). After spending most of the day tweeting about the upcoming vote, the president held a rally in Michigan, where he went through all his usual rhetorical gambits, including blaming the impeachment on Hillary (to chants of “Lock her up!”) and saying the Democrats were planning to impeach him before he even ran for the Republican nomination. Breitbart News had a story up calling the event a “raucous rally for the ages” before it had even started.

None of this is surprising to anyone who has been paying attention for the last two years, of course. As Kevin Roose of the New York Times pointed out in a September article entitled “Brace yourself for the Internet impeachment,” previous impeachments were fairly sedate affairs. But thanks to 24-hour news channels, social-media networks that prioritize clickbait, and the weaponization of right-wing anger over a host of social and political issues, we — and especially Trump — now live in a stew of disinformation — some of it targeted for political gain, some to cash in on ad revenue, and some for what the denizens of 4chan and Reddit describe as “the lulz.” And all of those forces tend to coalesce around issues like the impeachment, like moths to a flame. As my colleague Jon Allsop put it recently, “an unusually clear story about Trump seems to have become murkier by the day… not because the central facts have been undercut, but because of the present, hellish nature of our information ecosystem.”

Continue reading “Impeachment vote makes history, but right-wing circus continues”

This decade started with me taking a pretty big risk, when I quit my job at the Globe and Mail to join a blog network in San Francisco. I had a great few years and made a lot of new friends, and even though it all came to an abrupt end, I don’t regret it at all — in fact, I would do it again in a heartbeat! That was followed by a job at Fortune, where I learned a lot about how big-city news magazines work (not all of it good, if I’m being completely honest) and then I had the good fortune of landing a plum gig at the Columbia Journalism Review in New York, where I work with a great group of people on things that I am passionate about, which is all one can ask for in a job.

I’ve been fortunate enough to visit and make new friends in some amazing places, including a number of locations in Italy, as well as New York, Paris, London, Amsterdam, Munich, and more. I should note that none of this would have been possible without the help and support of my wife Rebecca, who overlooks my many flaws and is a great travelling partner! Our three awesome daughters made it out of high school and into various universities, where they pursued their respective passions with flair and enthusiasm. And I gained a great son-in-law and a furry grandson, and spent a lot of time in kayaks and canoes and walking in the woods, which restores the soul better than just about anything I can think of.

There have been some ups and downs along the way, no question; some cracks in a not-so-perfect facade. But as Leonard Cohen put it, there’s a crack in everything — that’s how the light gets in! All in all, it’s been a pretty great decade (and yes, I know that technically the decade doesn’t end until next year, but what can I say — people are drawn to round numbers). Here’s hoping that 2020 brings you and yours as much joy and happiness as humanly possible!