Thursday 14th January: Recommendation 'Chum boxes' are promoting disinformation

January 14, 2021

Good Morning! Today's Thursday news roundup is brought to you by Peter.

Big tech has mostly deplatformed Donald Trump. But there is one place misinformation spread by Trump-supporting seditionists can seemingly be shared unhindered - alongside the crappy health advice and celebrity sideshows that are all but ubiquitous at the bottom of otherwise legitimate websites.

Writing for Vice's Motherboard, Josh Sternberg highlights how content recommendation engines like Taboola and Outbrain are spreading political disinformation, fake news, and conspiracy theories increasingly blocked elsewhere.

In response to Sternberg's article, Taboola CEO Adam Singolda said the company has “a strong policy against working with any ‘bad actors,’ such as those that publish fake news.” But independent ad fraud auditor Augustine Fou points out in the piece that recommendation companies not only provide the tech infrastructure that allows disinfo sites to monetise but are also likely to ‘look the other way'.

We get that Taboola et al can be a significant revenue source for publishers who provide genuinely valuable information. But if you're letting this type of information onto your pages, maybe you need to think about how hard you criticise Trump, his supporters and the platforms that we all pretty much agree played a part in bringing us to where we are today.

You could be forgiven for thinking advertising is maybe an afterthought for the New York Times these days. But, with almost 30% of it's revenues coming from ads, in-house tech to leverage 1st party data in future ad programmes could be crucial to the publisher's financial success post 3rd-party cookies.

Everybody loves as good trend piece in January and this ensemble piece put together by the Drum's John McCarthy is pretty good. Optimistically, John says if 2020 was a year of challenges, 2021 offers many opportunities. Nimble innovation leads the pack, with partnerships and growth in social audiences getting a shout out too.

Finland's Helsingin Sanomat has developed The Climate Crisis Font to visualize climate change and its impact. The font shows how Arctic sea ice is predicted to shrink and the hope is that every headline, comment or article written with the font will highlight the real impact of climate change. The font is freely available for download.

This week's podcast:

Sara tells us about her process for writing a thoughtful, informative newsletter, whether Axios’ ‘smart brevity’ model can work for local news, and what lessons she’s taken from covering media companies that she applies to her own work.

We're not even two weeks in to 2021 and we've already had to spend our first episode of the year in discussions about Trump, Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg. If you'd like to ease our burden with a virtual coffee, head over to Ko-Fi and keep us powering through to next week.