No Light, Just Noise

While chatting with one of my cousins from the journalistic world on the topic of fake news, I realized that both traditional media companies/sites and tech sites each see only parts of the problem, tend to badmouth the other side indiscriminately, and believe in impossible/impractical solutions because they don’t understand the first thing about the other side!

First, not everyone gets a key difference between a tech company like Facebook and a “biased” media house. Fox News, for example, would only be watched by right wing folks in the US while New York Times would only be read by left leaning folks. Facebook, on the other hand, can feed both sets of folks exactly the news they already like. Is it a surprise that the world is moving to the site that follows the “Give the people what they like” approach for their news?

Next, let Scottie Nell Hughes, one of Trump’s spokespeople, take the point that most news media is biased (left or right) to its logical consequence:
“That's—on one hand, I hear half the media saying that these are lies. But on the other half, there are many people that go, 'No, it's true.'… Everybody has a way of interpreting them to be the truth, or not truth. There's no such thing, unfortunately, anymore as facts.”
Before you get all bent out of shape on hearing such a comment, think why we are in this situation. The crux of Hughes’ statement is the (sad but true) point that there is no easy way to find out what is a fact: Googling shows you what’s popular, not necessarily what’s true; traditional media is perceived to be biased; and political correctness has gone overboard in denying certain facts.

Here’s the tragicomic part: traditional media companies actually believe that algorithms can be written to detect what’s true and what isn’t. This betrays a colossal level of ignorance of how software is written/works: even a purely mathematical tool like Excel has bugs, just imagine how much tougher it is to write perfect software for emotive, non-standardized things like news?!

And yet, a non-tech media company like Reuters recently announced News Tracer, “an algorithm that weeds through every tweet (all 500 million of them that go up each day) to sort real news from spam, nonsense, ads, and noise”. How does that even work in a world where tweets often beat the media to news?
“The Bin-Laden raid, the Boston Marathon bombing, Scully’s life-saving landing on the Hudson. News often hits Twitter well before the mainstream media has a chance to catch up. In fact, according to Reuters’ internal research, about 20 percent of all news breaks on Twitter first.”
Curse Mark Zuckerburg all you like; but at least he seems to get the magnitude and extreme complexity of the problem we face.

Even worse, as Ben Thompson wrote, even if this naïve belief in the existence of an algorithmic fix were possible, did people advocating it think it through:
“The problem is the assumption that whoever wields that top-down power will just so happen to have the same views I do. What, though, if they don’t?”
Sounds like Animal Farm all over again. Do you really trust Reuters or Facebook to be the ultimate arbitrators of what is a fact?

What we need is a lot more thinking, and less screaming at Facebook/WhatsApp. Sadly, nobody wants to (is able to?) to do anything resembling thinking…

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