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Note: I originally wrote this for the newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

Almost two years after it first started talking about the idea, Facebook finally announced the first members of its so-called Oversight Board, the “Supreme Court” that will — theoretically, at least — have the ability to overrule Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg when it comes to questions about whether certain types of content should be taken down or not. The 20 initial members were announced last week (there will be a total of about 40 at some point in the future, Facebook says), and they are an impressive group, including a Nobel Peace Prize winner, multiple experts in constitutional law, a former federal court judge, etc. But despite this pedigreed roster, there are still plenty of problematic questions about the board itself, including: How much power will it actually have? Is it just an elaborate PR effort designed to make it look as though the company is doing something, to keep regulators at bay?

We used CJR’s Galley discussion platform to host a virtual panel discussion on these and other related questions, with input from a number of journalists and other experts including Daphne Keller, a director at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society and former deputy legal counsel at Google; Steven Levy, Wired magazine editor-at-large and author of the recent book “Facebook: The Inside Story“; David Kaye, the UN’s special rapporteur for freedom of expression; Alex Stamos, director of the Stanford Internet Observatory and former head of security at Facebook; Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University’s journalism school, and Rebecca MacKinnon, a co-founder of Global Voices and founding director of the Ranking Digital Rights project the New America Foundation.

Levy said he first heard about the oversight board concept when Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, mentioned it as something he was mulling over, a way to address his often-stated remark that “You don’t want me to determine who gets to say what.” The veteran technology writer said his reaction to Zuckerberg has always been to say “you built this system and now you own it, including the responsibility for what’s on it,” but he admitted that he is intrigued by the idea that Zuckerberg — even in a small way — has “authorized an outside body to overrule him, a power that for all effective purposes, even his board of directors doesn’t have.” MacKinnon, however, noted that while the board’s membership is illustrious, “it cannot stop the exploitative collection and sharing of user data, or stop the company from deploying opaque algorithms that prioritize inflammatory content to maximize engagement.”

Continue reading “Experts weigh in on Facebook’s new Oversight Board”

Note: I wrote this originally for the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

More than two years after Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and CEO of Facebook, first raised the idea of an independent “Supreme Court” that might help regulate content on the network, the first members of what it is now calling its Oversight Board have been named. The company released the names and bios of the 20 appointees on Wednesday morning, and also held a conference call with a number of journalists to take questions about the board and its mandate. The call was hosted by Thomas Hughes, director of administration for the Oversight Board, along with the board’s four co-chairs: Jamal Greene, a professor of law at Columbia University; Michael McConnell, director of the constitutional law center at Stanford and a former federal circuit-court judge; Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the former prime minister of Denmark, and Catalina Botero-Marino, the former special rapporteur for freedom of expression for the Organization of American States.

The 20 appointees announced on Wednesday — about half of the total number the board is expected to have when it is completed, according to Facebook executive Brent Harris — are an illustrious group that includes a director from Human Rights Watch, the founder of the Digital Rights Foundation in Pakistan, a professor at Stanford Law School, a First Amendment scholar and vice president at the Cato Institute, a director of the Open Society Initiative for West Africa, and Tawakkol Karman, a Yemeni winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. The group also includes a couple of journalists: Alan Rusbridger, former editor-in-chief of the Guardian, and Endy Bayuni, a senior editor at Indonesia’s Jakarta Post. In a Medium post about his appointment, Rusbridger says about his decision: “Will it work? Let’s see. There is, in my view, no excuse for not trying. The balancing of free expression with the need for a better-organised public square is one of the most urgent causes I can imagine.”

As CJR has explained before, the idea behind the oversight board is to have an independent body that can make decisions about the often contentious decisions that Facebook makes — whether to take down an image of a naked Vietnamese girl covered in napalm, for example. There are a number of restrictions on what the board can review: at least for now, it can only hear cases about things that have been taken down, not things that have been left up, and its ambit doesn’t extend to WhatsApp. Facebook says it is committed to the independence of the group, and that under the charter that it put together to govern the board, its decisions are binding — meaning it will theoretically be forced to implement them (unless doing so would break the law). Some see the board as a valuable check on Facebook’s power to control the speech and behavior of billions of users. But others question whether the board will truly be independent or effective against such a massive corporate entity, and see it as a fig leaf that allows Facebook to pretend it cares about such topics.

Continue reading “Facebook’s new oversight board: Supreme Court or fig leaf?”

Since people aren’t supposed to go outside or meet in groups during the coronavirus pandemic, people are spending a lot more time online, and one of the things they are doing (apart from endless Zoom calls) is trying to recreate some of the things they enjoyed during more normal times — like the old campfire singalong or basement jam session, for example. Someone in need of the latter created a Facebook group called the Isolation 2020 Country Jamboree, and it has quickly become one of my favorite stopping points on Facebook. The idea behind the group — which had 26,000 members when I wrote this — is that anyone can record themselves playing the guitar or piano or whatever instrument they feel like playing, and then upload it to share with everyone who is missing live music. It’s really great.

I found the group after a friend posted about it a few weeks ago, and asked me to play and upload a song (a John Prine one, since he had just passed away). So I recorded one, and uploaded it, and I think it got 5 likes or something like that, and one nice comment. I confess this made me a little irritated, since I thought I was much better than lots of the other people who were uploading songs (in my own mind anyway) and some of them got dozens or even hundreds of likes and comments. Social-media thirst is a terrible affliction 🙂 Anyway, at first I thought the hell with it, I don’t need to go there any more, most of the singers are terrible, and their videos are bad, and so on. Or that’s what I told myself anyway. But I kept seeing them pop up in my Facebook feed, and I clicked on a few, and I have to say the whole thing kind of started to grow on me.

Not only were some of the videos and songs pretty good — in some cases by people who play professionally, and have albums, etc. like Heather Valley, who has an excellent voice — but even some of the “bad” ones started to grow on me. The whole thing is like a giant campfire singalong with hundreds of guitarists and singers, some of whom are excellent and some of whom are, well… enthusiastic at least. Some are shy (and a few of them are the best) and some are very confident without reason. But some are just quietly great, and some of the ones you wouldn’t expect turn out to be the most talented, with great voices, and some great guitar playing. There was even a guy who recreated an entire Supertramp song with all the keyboard parts, plus the snippets of a Winston Churchill speech that were included in the original.

In some cases, their phones are pointed up at the ceiling, or they have fingerprints all over them, or they are too far away, or the volume isn’t high enough, but in most cases the passion comes through anyway and none of that matters. Some of my favorites are the ones where the player is sitting in their garage or a woodshed, with their overalls or work clothes on, and maybe their guitar isn’t the best, and then they launch into something and it’s just great. One guy standing in his garage as his kids rode in and out on bikes admitted that he’d had a few beers after work and then did a great version of My Home Town by Bruce Springsteen. I’ve been going through it and adding comments on almost every one of them, telling them they did a great job and to keep it up. Maybe it’s the cabin fever talking, but it’s become one of my favorite things.

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

act-checking and verification was already a crucial skill for journalists even before the COVID-19 pandemic came along, thanks in part to the rise of Donald Trump and the alt-right’s weaponization of social media as a distribution method for misinformation. But the coronavirus has made fact-checking and filtering skills even more important, as trolls traffic in rumors about how drinking bleach or taking mega-doses of vitamin C can cure the virus, or how the rollout of 5G technology caused COVID-19 (misinformation that Twitter is now removing in the UK if it presents a tangible threat, after a number of antennas were toppled and burned). Complicating things even further is the fact that the president of the US himself is spreading misinformation about whether the virus can be treated by injecting disinfectant or using UV rays inside the body.

To talk about some of the skills and tactics that journalists (or anyone, for that matter) can use to fight this kind of misinformation, we used CJR’s Galley discussion platform to speak with a number of experts in fact-checking and verification, all of whom are co-authors of the latest edition of the Verification Handbook, which was published earlier this week by the European Journalism Centre (later this week, we’ll be using Galley to interview Gemma Mendoza of Rappler, Brandy Zadrozny of NBC, and Claire Wardle of First Draft). Craig Silverman, the media editor at BuzzFeed, selected all the authors and edited the handbook, and says the skills described in it are more important than they have ever been.

“It’s important for journalists to embrace complexity and to resist instinctively grasping for the obvious explanation,” Silverman told CJR. To give one example, he said, there has been a lot of bad reporting that assumes Russian trolls are to blame for everything bad on social media. “Poorly worded politics tweet from a newly-created Twitter account? Russian troll! Someone promoting trump? Russian troll!” In reality, the provenance of a specific rumor or hoax may be a lot more complicated, involving 4chan posts that were then shared on Twitter and picked up by an alt-right media outlet, and then tweeted by the president. And the platforms share much of the blame, Donie O’Sullivan of CNN told CJR. “We had a story this week about a conspiracy theory falsely claiming an innocent woman in the US was coronavirus patient zero. The conspiracy had been circulating on YouTube for weeks and the company didn’t do a whole lot about it.”

Continue reading “Fighting misinformation during a global pandemic”

I didn’t know this, but the modern idea of Shakespeare as an almost unparalleled artist and genius of the stage was essentially an eighteenth-century creation. There were many reasons for this, including the fact that at the beginning of the eighteenth century, all of the London theatres had been closed during the Puritan Interregnum (1649–60) following the English Civil War. After the Restoration, the easygoing and licentious Charles II ascended the throne that had been vacant since the military defeat and subsequent execution of his father, and all forms of entertainment were once again legitimized, including the theatre and related pursuits.

After the Restoration, the easygoing and licentious Charles II ascended the throne that had been vacant since the military defeat and subsequent execution of his father, and all forms of entertainment were once again legitimized, including theatre and related pursuits. Londoners, fed up with Puritan austerity and intolerance, threw themselves into the new hedonism with a vengeance, and the reopening of the theatres in 1660 drew a definitive line between the repressive past and the exciting new era in which the senses—physical, aesthetic, sensual—would be celebrated rather than denied.

That same year saw the very first appearance by a professional woman performer on the English stage. Before the 1640s, female characters had been played by young men, but now there was a new focus of popular idolatry: a creature that James Boswell called “that delicious subject of gallantry, an actress.” Charles II himself led the titillating fashion in taking as his mistress the charming and celebrated comedienne Nell Gwyn. David Garrick was at the beginning of a career that would make him one of the most celebrated actors in British history, and he and Samuel Johnson almost single-handedly created the modern cult of Shakespeare.

via https://hudsonreview.com/2020/04/the-shakespeareans/#.XqWD28hKg2x

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

If it wasn’t already obvious that the media industry was in dire straits before the coronavirus came along, it has become abundantly obvious now. Every day, it seems, news outlets both large and small announce waves of furloughs, salary cuts, and layoffs for significant numbers of their employees — the Los Angeles Times, Tribune Publishing, BuzzFeed, McClatchy (which had already filed for bankruptcy before the pandemic), Conde Nast, even Fox Corp. have all implemented cuts. Protocol, the tech news startup launched by the owners of Politico in February, just laid off almost half its newsroom. Some newspapers in smaller communities have shut down completely, and may or may not be able to return once the economy picks up. So what should we be doing about this? Should there be some kind of government bailout? Should digital platforms like Google and Facebook be forced to subsidize a public fund for media? And if so, how would the recipients be chosen and by whom?

Those are just some of the questions CJR wanted answers to, so we convened a virtual panel on our Galley discussion platform this week with some of those who have thought long and hard about these issues. We spoke to Victor Pickard, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of the recent book “Democracy Without Journalism”; Craig Aaron, co-CEO of Free Press; Travis Waldron from HuffPost; David Chavern, director of the News Media Alliance; John Stanton from the Save Journalism Project; Sarah Alvarez from Outlier Media; Anne Nelson from Columbia University; Jonathan O’Connell, a financial reporter at the Washington Post; Steven Waldman, co-founder of Report For America; Chris Horne from The Devil Strip in Akron, Ohio; Melissa Davis from Colorado Media; Yosef Getachew from Common Cause; and John Schleuss, president of The NewsGuild-CWA. Those interviews and more are all available on the Galley featured page.

“it is now abundantly clear that there is no commercial solution for local journalism,” said Victor Pickard. “Local journalism was in shambles even before the pandemic struck. But now the newspaper industry – which is still our major source for original local reporting in the US – is facing existential doom. Given that context, we need immediate emergency funding.” Pickard went on to say that any funds handed out should be conditional on news outlets either becoming nonprofits or working towards that status. “Otherwise, we risk propping up failed commercial models,” he said. Craig Aaron of Free Press talked about the letter that his group, along with PEN America and Common Cause, sent to Congress, calling on the House and Senate to take immediate action to help journalists. The letter asked for emergency funds for newsrooms and increased federal appropriations for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to support public and community media of all kinds, especially in smaller communities.

Continue reading “What needs to be done to help the media industry”

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

Since we are currently in a global pandemic that has caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and the closure of stores, restaurants, and other hallmarks of normal life, it’s not surprising many people are searching for things to take their minds off the gloom. And what they are clinging to — and sharing on social networks — is often explicitly “good news,” whether it’s heart-warming stories about kids having virtual birthday parties where friends drive by and honk their horns, or people banging pots and pans to celebrate health-care workers. There’s even a “news network” dedicated to this kind of thing, although it’s a tongue-in-cheek take on the genre. It’s a YouTube channel that consists of actor John Krasinski, best known for his role in the sitcom The Office, sitting at a desk in what appears to be his den, dressed in a suit and hosting a show he calls Some Good News, complete with a hand-painted sign that reads SGN (drawn by his children). He throws to video clips and does live interviews, just like John Oliver or Stephen Colbert, but the purpose is to be uplifting, not satirical.

Krasinski’s show may be the most recent example, but it’s far from the only one. Musician David Byrne, co-founder of The Talking Heads, launched a site last year called Reasons to be Cheerful (a name taken from a song by British musician Ian Dury) that he said was designed to give people reasons for hope, as opposed to the bleak landscape that traditional news offers. Byrne has described it as “part magazine, part therapy session, part blueprint for a better world.” He told Rolling Stone magazine he wanted to give people something to make them feel better about the world. “It often seems as if the world is going straight to Hell. I wake up in the morning, I look at the paper, and… often I’m depressed for half the day,” he said. Mother Jones magazine has a newsletter that focuses on positive news called Recharge, and the Washington Post has a similar newsletter filled with “inspiring” stories called The Optimist. Before it became synonymous with clickbait headlines, the digital news aggregator Upworthy was designed to distribute feel-good stories via social media.

It seems churlish to even question this trend, because it’s so clearly designed to be heart-warming. Who doesn’t want their heart warmed, especially when we are all marinating in a stew of fear and despair? And even if someone didn’t want their heart warmed, what kind of monster would begrudge someone else having theirs warmed? Especially if it’s by a little girl being serenaded by the entire cast of Hamilton because she couldn’t make it to the real Broadway show. Watching that kind of gesture — as calculated or orchestrated as it might be — touches a very human place in us, like watching kittens play with string, or seeing a child do something adorably dumb. When I shared a short video clip of a spring stream flowing through the woods near my house recently, several people I don’t even know thanked me profusely for it, as though I had offered them a drink after days of crawling through the desert.

Continue reading “The good news trend: Uplifting or delusional? Or both?”

Note: I originally wrote this for the newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I’m the chief digital writer

When Protocol, a new site focusing on technology coverage, launched in February, expectations were high. After all, the man behind the site — Robert Allbritton, who owns it through his holding company, Capital News — also helped create Politico, one of the most successful digital media companies of the last 20 years or so. And it sounded like Protocol was going to duplicate the Politico model: hire a bunch of talented writers away from leading publications, set them loose on a topic, and then rely on a combination of advertising and high-end subscription revenue to pay the bills. Lather, rinse and repeat. Except that’s not what happened. This week, Protocol laid off 13 of its employees, according to one report, and it appears that more than three-quarters of that total — or 10 staff in all — were reporters and editors. The site’s entire complement of editors and reporters numbered about 25 before the layoffs, according to Protocol’s About page, which means that Allbritton just laid off almost half of the site’s newsroom.

Obviously, no one in the media industry saw the coronavirus coming, and it has thrown a wrench into the revenue plans of virtually every news publisher out there, big or small. Companies have been cutting salaries, putting reporters and editors on paid leave, and taking other steps to curb their spending in the hope that they can survive the virus-triggered downturn in advertising. But it’s difficult to think of a publisher that has taken the kind of extreme step that Protocol has, and laid off more than 40 percent of the staff that report and edit its news. In a memo to staff, Allbritton and two senior managers said that the coronavirus “has done nothing to shake our faith in Protocol’s mission or our long-term opportunity,” but added that its spinoff effects have “profoundly changed the economic realities of the present” (CJR tried to get a comment from Protocol or Allbritton, but they didn’t respond by publication time).

In a memo to staff at Politico, Allbritton said the current crisis “has elements of the fear that we felt after 9/11, the financial worry that we experienced in 2008, and the unknown that surrounds a natural disaster like a hurricane or tornado all rolled into one.” He went on to say that Protocol “hired ambitiously in anticipation of rolling out a significant number of new growth products in the second half of 2020,” and that he had to make the “difficult but necessary decision to reduce short-term costs until a more robust revenue pipeline resumes.” What’s confusing about the layoff decision, given this statement, is the finality of it. Many companies have put their staff on furlough, which implies that they will be able to come back once the economic downturn starts to recede. If Protocol’s owner was genuinely committed to its “mission and long-term opportunity,” why wouldn’t he keep some of those 13 people around by putting them on paid leave, or cutting salaries enough to meet short-term goals?

Continue reading “Protocol layoffs raise some troubling questions”