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- Wednesday 17th April: When Facebook blocks news, studies show the political risks that follow
Wednesday 17th April: When Facebook blocks news, studies show the political risks that follow
Good morning! Today’s newsletter is brought to you by Chris. Have you seen the agenda for our upcoming Publisher Podcast Summit? It’s astonishing — and we haven’t even released all the names yet!
Grab a pint, and join this fine group of magazine people on May Day as we ask them how they’ve survived and thrived in this messed-up modern media landscape.
If you want to know who will be the real winner of the ongoing spat between publishers and platforms, look no further than this article. The short answer? The absolute worst people you could possibly imagine. In lieu of news content on Facebook in Canada — which it’s pulled rather than negotiate direct payments to publishers — people are consuming more right-wing meme images.
“A separate NewsGuard study conducted for Reuters found that likes, comments and shares of what it categorised as ‘unreliable’ sources climbed to 6.9% in Canada in the 90 days after the ban, compared to 2.2% in the 90 days before.” So that’s pretty bad, and it’s as a direct result of there being no adults in the room when publishers and platforms discuss their relationshhip.
And just in case you were about to say that it’s only the publishers doing wrong here: Alden Capital titles have run op-eds protesting Google’s potential shutdown of news content in California — without being transparent about who is actually behind those op-eds.
We mourned the end of PressPad’s current incarnation in this newsletter a few weeks ago, but this in-depth look at what it achieved during its lifespan is well worth reading. As the article points out PressPad didn’t always get its messaging exactly spot on, but its heart was always in the right place. We’d echo Benton’s hope at the end — that someone can take up its mission.
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As I’ve said a few times on the podcast, the rush to put everything behind paywalls leaves a huge subset of the public to the predations of disinformation peddlers. We saw some excellent examples of publishers dropping the paywall around Coronavirus coverage and the war in Ukraine — and now the former managing editor of Time is saying it should be done around the US elections as well.
On this week’s podcast we spoke about the seemingly permanent opacity of the digital advertising ecosystem and the disincentives from the platforms to address it. As if by black magic, here comes some research from Mozilla that shows, unsurprisingly, “in some cases, notably (but not exclusively) X’s, the level of ad transparency provided by the platform scores close to zero on all fronts”.
