What's Wrong with News?

Since Jimmy Wales came to speak at the University of Alabama last weekend, I've been thinking more about WikiTribune, his new-ish news curation/creation venture. This seems like a rare opportunity to contribute to the building of a tool that has the backing of the creator of one of the most popular, influential, important websites in the world. Of course the venture might fail, because most new ventures fail and because news is a tricky thing to get right, maybe trickier in a lot of ways than building something akin to a library or encyclopedia. WikiTribune seems to be functioning right now as a collectively curated news aggregation website; it might evolve into something else in the future, but I'll assume that's what it is for now.

What might be the starting points for a platform like this? If news is broken (which seems a fairly uncontroversial take in 2019), what part of it could be fixed by a Wiki-type platform?

First, there's the issue of factual accuracy. A decent way of getting a newsfeed that only has news that is factually correct is just by linking to stories that are from sources that can be held accountable, that have a reputation, and that typically follow standard journalistic practices. You weed out the parody stories, the polarizing disinformation, the deliberate attempts to poison discourse with fake news. This seems like something a dedicated group of volunteers could do.

I feel like the factual accuracy problem isn't as widespread as some believe, that networks of upvoting and sharing bots only make it seem as though a handful of untrue stories are being very widely read and believed. Of course, there are most likely relatively small pockets of people who are actually believing in false stories and act on those beliefs, and despite their relatively small numbers, they can be very harmful to society. And various characteristics of popular social media platforms such as Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook (such as algorithms that don't vet information, the ability for anyone to post and share anything, being too big and too fast to moderate) increase the footprint and influence of false stories beyond what they were in the pre-internet says.

I doubt WikiTribune would lure the type of folks who seek out false stories away from their favorite hyperpartisan sites, but who knows what might happen if it eventually became even a tenth as popular as Wikipedia. Maybe it would end up as a kind of standard system for current events information vetting, a better middle layer between journalism and audiences than social media currently is. Most people would then recognize the false news stories and sources in a way that most people did before the internet: as a kind of inevitable fringe to the information ecosphere, relegated to a recognizable outskirt rather than popping up in the midst of a feed of journalism vetted in the traditional way (as tends to happen w/ news via social media). It's important to know whether factually inaccurate news exists, how much of it exists, and who is sharing and reading it, but it's also important to think about where, in our information environment, it resides. Is it concentrated or distributed? In the center or on the periphery?

During his talk, Wales brought up the problem of clickbait headlines: headlines that mislead audiences, play on our emotional, tribal, impulsive tendencies, exploit a kind of shallow curiosity. So, maybe WikiTribune curators use a kind of rough guiding principle: avoid posting clickbait headlines (or maybe just rewrite the headlines. Often, the stories are fine, but the headlines seem like they were written by search engine optimizers). Obviously, clickbait is a term with a fuzzy definition, but that's nothing new, and certainly doesn't stop websites, publishers, etc. from moderating various kinds of vaguely-defined content standard. Get multiple experienced coders to rate each headline's clickbait-iness, and when they agree, don't post it or re-write the headline.

Wales also brought up ads and their effects on content, one of which is to essentially incentivize the creation of clickbait headlines. But I guess I'm a bit unclear on how to account for the fact that many of the sources to which WikiTribune links are ad supported. Related to this, how does WikiTribune work with paywall news sites? Wales seemed to be pro-paywall, to endorse the idea that if more news sites were subscription-funded rather than ad-funded, the quality of information would improve. Would WikiTribune just give you a taste of the article, a kind of abstract or summary, something a bit more than a headline, some kind of compromise that would give the reader some value while not totally substituting for the story itself, perhaps pushing users to the full article in the way that Wikipedia might push users to the source material? That seems reasonable to me.

He also brought up algorithms. Perhaps algorithms also, in some way, guide news consumers and creators toward more clickbait-y headlines. If you have humans in the loop, maybe it would be easier to slow or stop the prevalence of clickbait and false news.

He also brought up the fact that Wikipedia is not totally open and it's not a democracy, and I think that's a way of setting this apart from the primary news aggregator of our time, Reddit. Reddit is ostensibly open, and is a kind of democracy: registered users submit and vote on content, thereby increasing or decreasing its visibility. Over time, this has led to certain kinds of news stories ending up on the front page. You might call it a product of 'hivemind.' It has a certain narrow tonal range, and a certain focus on particular topics that reflects the interests and values of the voting public.

There is recent talk of moderators playing a bigger role in directing what gets posted in subreddits, and the inevitable push-back by those who value unfettered speech and a democratic public sphere above all else. I doubt that push-back will fully subside on Reddit because voting for the noteworthiness of content is a defining characteristic of the platform. It's not ancillary in the way that 'likes' are to Instagram. But if you start a new site that simply doesn't have that as one of it's defining characteristics, you don't necessarily have that problem. Sure, a lot of people believe strongly in a flat hierarchy, an open democratic sphere, but I think that enough people have been repulsed by what that yielded to want something else.

Somewhat more controversially, we might consider the question of tone and emotion in news, and whether or not that needs 'fixing,' or could be fixed. Personally, I'm turned off by the abundance of outrage and fear that many news stories in 2019 evoke, but I recognize that an argument can be (and has been) made for the value of anger and fear in this sphere. Here, I think it's more a matter of personal preference, and not everyone would agree on this, but some would like, sometimes, to see a newsfeed that features less fear and anger. I feel like that's where a lot of popular democratic news feeds, like r/news on Reddit, end up: a kind of distilled outrage and fear.

Here, we need think about the purpose of news. Is it a kind of 'immune system' for societies that's sole purpose is to detect threats and alert us to them? Well then, it seems entirely appropriate that news would invoke anger and fear. Should news be more broad, emotionally, than that? Should it invoke wonder, curiosity, gratitude? You have subreddits like r/upliftingnews that cater to another point on the emotional spectrum, so it's not as if there isn't already a place for that in many people's information diets.

Then there's the matter of filter bubbles/echo chambers, and I don't know that there's much that WikiTribune could do about that. I think worries about filter bubbles and echo chambers are somewhat overstated and/or that we'll never fully solve that problem, and while we wait around for the perfect solution, we're making do with a pretty lousy news ecosystem that's run, by default, by impulsive clicks and a lack of accountability. I think pure democracy was one potential solution - giving the power of vetting and curation to anyone and everyone - but we've seen how well that went.

Wikipedia never solved the filter bubble problem when it came to creating an encyclopedia. The editors don't remotely reflect the readership, in terms of race, gender, education level, ideology, etc. Wikipedia isn't flawless, but it seems to be working well enough, and I gather that there is a sense within the organization that they should try to broaden the diversity of people who edit it to include more women and people of color. Should it also try to include more people who identify as politically conservative? Does it make sense to pursue intellectual diversity among information curators as well?

It looks like the current version of WikiTribune features a way to follow particular feeds curator by particular Wiki-editors. If that's the case, then what's to stop a couple of ultra-liberal or ultra-conservative editors from setting up feeds full of clickbait and partisan vitriol? Is there some overseer that decides when editors have gone too far, similar to the way that admins on Reddit ultimately have control over volunteer moderators? Might that decision as to what goes too far be motivated by one's ideology?

Yes. But I get the sense that Wikipedia has already dealt with similarly motivated people who have tried to turn Wikipedia into a more partisan information environment, and it has some sort of mechanism for dealing with them that seems to be largely effective. Is the mechanism entirely democratic and open? Probably not, but now might be the time that some of the public revisits the relationship between direct democracy and news curation and distribution.

Even if something similar to WikiTribune existed in the past (and I get the sense that that's the case) and ultimately failed, that does not determine whether WikiTribune will fail. There are many, many cases in which a creation didn't succeed because it was timed poorly. Maybe we had to wait to see how poorly open, democratic, free-for-all, algorithmic, impulsive curation of news would go before there would enough demand for something like WikiTribune to be sustainable. I'm just happy to see someone trying something like this right now.

A World Without Frames

I had the privilege of seeing Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, speak at the University of Alabama, courtesy of The Blackburn Institute. In anticipation of seeing him speak, I'd been reflecting on the value of Wikipedia in a post-2016 world. Since the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, it seems as though the discourse on social media has become more toxic and less fact-based, that traditional news outlets don't quite know what to do with Trump and his international equivalents, and that non-traditional news outlets are creating and disseminating biased and false information about our world. All the while, Wikipedia continues to churn away, largely free from the toxicity and contentiousness that has gripped the rest of the internet and, seemingly, the rest of the world. How did they do it?

I went into the talk with a slightly more specific version of that question: is it the particular approach/model that Wikipedia uses that is responsible for its relative success vis a vis the Truth, or is it the particular domain in which it operates - that of the encyclopedia? Wales didn't quite speak to this question, but he did talk about his relatively new passion project: the WikiTribune. In a way, the fate of that venture will answer the question, as it applies the model and logic of Wikipedia to the world of news and current events. Wales' working theory seemed to be that ads were largely to blame for the degradation of news: the way that the online ad economy works puts all websites on an even playing field, all competing against one another for attention. News sites do not just compete with other news sites; they compete with parody news sites, entertainment sites, gossip sites, etc. He praised the recent move toward the subscription model, noting that the New York Times has seen recent financial success pursuing this model. Subscriptions prompt users to think, 'what is the overall value of this product, in the long term?' That's a key shift in thinking, from what you click on in an impulsive manner to what you value, a shift from short term thinking to long term thinking. So, if we get rid of the ads, do we improve the quality of news and discourse around news?

My suspicion is that there is another factor at play: whether the content pertains exclusively to current events. News must privilege certain stories over others in a way that an encyclopedia or a library does not, assuming it has a front page (can we conceive of a news site without a front page, regardless of whether said front page is personalized?). Here, the decades of research on framing and agenda setting is relevant: by virtue of editorial decisions about what to cover and what not to cover, news gets us to think about certain issues or events (or certain aspects of those issues/events) and ignore others. Encyclopedias do not direct attention in quite the same way. Sure, it could be argued that within a given entry, an encyclopedia/wikipedia chooses to emphasize certain aspects of the subject while ignoring or downplaying others, and thus frames the subject in a way that shapes perception. But I'd argue the way in which Wikipedia has incorporated different perspectives on contentious topics into entries reduces this effect.

Can you do the same thing with news? Is that what WikiTribune will be?

I haven't a clue. But it was kind of thrilling to be in the room with someone who was taking a stab at solving a problem of this scope, someone who was uniquely positioned to stand a decent chance of succeeding.

What is Wikipedia now?

I was searching for information on a current event for class discussion: the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings. Before, I was assigning a reading to another class: the wikipedia entry on Bandura's Bobo Doll study (I didn't feel as though students were ready to read an academic article from the early 60's, and I thought that the wikipedia article did a good job of distilling the essence of the article and doing so in a manner that most undergrads could understand and remember it). I felt a bit guilty about using Wikipedia in these ways. I wasn't holding up Wikipedia as an object of study (how is it created? Who creates it? How trustworthy is it relative to other sources?), but instead using it as if it were a legitimate source of information.

Upon reflecting on these feelings of guilt, I thought about how Wikipedia has probably changed over the past few years, since gaining prominence. Initially, the question was "is Wikipedia as reliable as published sources?" The assumption was that, because it is open to be edited by anyone, it could never be as reliable as published, vetted sources. As far as I know, it is still as open to change as it was back then (though perhaps the structure of correcting errors and detecting bias has been improved), but I think its wrong to assume that openness determines the extent to which any document is trustworthy. The factor that people should be paying attention to is motivation to introduce bias.

Think about other sources of information on the web. Is there some motivation to introduce bias to the information? In most case, there is some motivation. Maybe it is to please corporate shareholders, or to retain a certain audience so that they can get more views within that niche and generate profit that keeps them afloat. With Wikipedia, there are some particular topics that are edited frequently by interested parties, but as I understand it, the system has a way of detecting those and flagging those. But for my purposes, for using it in class as a way of getting the facts straight about Sandy Hook, or learning about Social Learning Theory, doesn't it present a much more even-handed, complete summation of these entities than any other available source on current events?

Maybe it wasn't always this way. There might have been a contingent of people adamant on shaping public perception of some event or entity that systematically altered the Wikipedia entries on those things. That was when there was some public conversation about the trustworthiness of Wikipedia entries. But now that that conversation has dropped out of the news cycle, out of the public consciousness, are those interested parties still as numerous, and as interested? These things have implications for the true trustworthiness of the content on Wikipedia. I am skeptical that people intent on fooling people retained their passion for altering Wikipedia entries, or, in that passion, eclipsed the Herculian efforts of volunteers working for Wikipedia to keep it free of disinformation and bias. But who knows?

The Value of the Venue

Most of my "new" ideas come to me when I'm taking two different texts (be they books, TV shows, articles, blogs, whatever) and think about how one of them looks when viewed through the filter provided by the other. In this case, I was reading Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody, then excerpts from Marx's Capital (required for a class, of course). There's a point that's made in Shirky's book about the value of sites like flickr, YouTube, Facebook, blogs, Google, wikipedia, and other social web sites that allow for new kinds of behavior (or at least expedited versions of old behavior). He claims that the activities that users engage in on these sites aren't new in and of themselves, nor are the motivations behind them, but because these people can be connected to one another in new ways, the outcomes of their actions are radically more efficient and effective in a lot of cases.

I recall seeing someone make a presenation at Emerson College sometime in early 2007 on the unjust-ness of sites like YouTube and Facebook that made billions of dollars for their creators but didn't give dime one to the users who provided all the content that apparently gave the site its appeal and was responsible for its high value. We users, collectively, spend millions of hours communicating over Facebook, sending messages and embellishing our pages while the creator of Facebook spent virtually no time generating content on the site. He gets billions of dollars, we get zilch. If we didn't put the content on his site, then there would be no reason for anyone else to go to the site, and the owners of the site wouldn't make shit. So then, don't we deserve a cut of the profits? Reading Marx's account of worker exploitation at the hands of business owners brought this to the front of my mind again.

This seemed logical enough to me at the time, but after reading Shirky, I think that this line of criticism makes a mistake. We're used to attributing credit and value to acts of creativity or "work" that we can see and measure. But here's the thing about social networking sites. We've been socially networking since the dawn of civilization. This resulted in certain kinds of relationships, both personal and professional. If there was no venue for these new connections, for these new ways of pooling information and making it searchable, then we would be doing what we were doing before: just talking to each other, making the same old kinds of connections with other people, and we certainly wouldn't expect to be getting paid for doing so. Web 2.0 sites create new kinds of connections that could not exist without these new venues.

We might acknowledge that the companies that created and maintains the infrastructure that new communication runs on (the phone companies, ISPs, etc) are owed money. But why should the inventors of Facebook and YouTube make billions when someone else could've just as easily created a venue to connect people to other people? Those venues were, in a sense, inevitable. In Marxist terms, why does there need to be that much surplus revenue?

Again, I think critics of such large profits are missing a point. What makes these sites so valuable are the subtle ways in which they make finding what you need (what you might not even have been aware that you need) easier. Search technology is incredibly hard to perfect, and the better it does its job, the less noticable it is. Google feels intuitive. It makes almost everything (socializing, shopping, traveling, schoolwork, being an informed citizen, conducting business) easier. And yet I almost never think of it as a "product" in the traditional sense. Its doubly hard to think of it as a product because you pay for it in attention to ads that you barely notice.

That's why I like thinking about these sites as venues. Like real world venues, they're so easy to forget about, yet so necessary for communication and labor. You're so focused on the visible work and communication going on around you that you don't think about the architecture, the urban planning, the engineering, the intellectual capital that was spent generating the surroundings in which you communicate and work.

Making searching for the information or the people you want better is value added. Its tough to say whether its of greater value than the content being provided. Both the content and the venue would be nothing without the other. But one is more visible and easier to think about than another, so there's a tendency to undervalue the cost of conceiving, creating, and maintaining the venue.

Its that conception phase that's the trickiest to put a pricetag on. And that's where I find Marx and the corresponding unregulated free market extremists to be of little use when determining the value of anything. Let's take all that surplus $ that CEOs and upper management make. Where does it go? Some of it is used to buy creature comforts - huge houses, huge cars, a bunch of ultimately useless shit that signals "I AM RICH." I can't argue that this is a drawback of modern capitalism (though I don't think modern capitalism necessarily promotes such extreme levels of wasteful spending. We have commercialism to thank for that, not capitalism). The truth is that the vast majority of rich people's money is invested in some way. Those investments (in principle but not in practice due to lousy accounting practices, lack of discipline, and false advertising) are used to fund people who are creating new venues, either in the form of school loans or small business loans. In principle, if everything is well regulated and on the up and up (which, admittedly, it hasn't been of late), then you get a culture that comes up with more new venues that allows people to communicate and work in new ways, like Google, Facebook, and whatever's next.

Marketing and Terrorism, part 2: NIN's Year Zero ARG

I'm especially fond of stuff I find on the internet in indirect, multiple ways. First, I saw something on digg.com about the marketing of a new NIN album via strange websites. Then, a student of mine emailed me a story from mtv.com about the websites. At first glance, it appears to be an ARG (alternate reality game) dedicated to marketing the yet-to-be-released Nine Inch Nails album Year Zero. Nothing particularly remarkable there. But there are numerous references to bioterrorism. Will this get NIN and their marketing firm into hot water a la ATHF?

What's interesting is that once you get out on the web, authorship becomes so murky that it might be impossible to hold anyone responsible for possible confusion between marketing and terrorism. Whose to say which sites are officially sanctioned and which are not? I always thought of viral marketing as an insidious way of turning fans into unwitting marketers, which may seem harmless now, but in the long run may reduce us to state of paranoia where we spend untold hours and cognitive energy trying to figure out what is reliable information about our environment and what is merely an attempt to sell us something. But this idea of including a controversial topic like terrorism (is it overhyped? is it underhyped?) seems like a new, clever twist. Both NIN and ATHF (purposely in the case of NIN, accidentally in the case of ATHF, I think) are allying their product with one side of this controversy - the leftist position that terrorism is overhyped. If you wear a t shirt with Err giving the finger, or design your own Year Zero bioterrorism website, you're simultaneously saying that you think terrorism has been overhyped and saying that you like NIN and ATHF.

Its tough for me to be objective about this, since I'm a big fan of both ATHF and NIN, and I think that the current administration doesn't understand terrorism as well as it could. But if I take a step back, I realize that ARGs are becoming political, and perhaps involving the authorities in a kind of theater that they're not even aware that they're a part of (a la the "characters" in Borat). I wouldn't say that the motives of the company or the artist are either profit or politics. They're both. Its designed to get you to buy the album, but its also designed to get young people to recognize the manipulative nature of military recruitment.

Since this is open to fan participation, if the fans don't like the music or the direction the story takes, perhaps they can take those in a different direction, though I'm simultaneously skeptical that either a mob-rule story or the stridently political story that Year Zero is shaping up to be (yes, yes, we get it. Bush sucks) will be anything revolutionary.

Again, the problem that this creates, the problem that all contemporary viral or stealth marketing adds to, is an erosion of our ability to communicate with one another about our environment effectively. ARGs are post-modern media's logical conclusion in the era of convergence, and they raise the same question: are they good, b/c they get people to see how most our "reality" is a social construction primarily made up of media texts, or is it bad, b/c it encourages people to doubt everything, to not take anything seriously. While I mull this one over, it'll be fun to see what happens with Year Zero.

Oh, and BTW, doesn't wikipedia kinda spoil the surprise of ARGs? People just aggregate data on that site, so all you have to do is check up on it every so often. It undergoes a rigorous vetting process, much more rigorous than you and your friends, digg, cable news channels, or the New York Times could ever hope for. And it does it fast.