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Journalists decry Facebook experiment's impact on democracy

theguardian.com

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Re: Journalists decry Facebook experiment's impact on democracy

#131

Post by delhanty »

peoplewindow wrote: post #113
delhanty wrote: post #55

Have no love for Facebook but: The Guardian would publish this wouldn't they? This is a good idea by former editor (1975-95 [1]) Peter Preston: move The Guardian back to Manchester from London and trim the wage bill in the process. [2] Perhaps then they might slow the cash burn of their Scott "Trust" endowment (£838.3m 2015) ... [3] Also, if they weren't quite so London centric they might be less surprised by "events…

The Guardian has been pushing the line that non-Guardian news sources are 'dangerous for democracy' for a long time now. Other similar publications like the NYT have the same viewpoint. It's impressive double think: what they mean is, exposure to views they disagree with might cause people to vote against things Guardian writers like and for things Guardian writers dislike, therefore, it's important that such people…

This.

The publishing that they did concerning Snowden was important for journalistic freedom.

All that stuff stopped after Katherine Viner became editor in 2015.

I do read it occasionally - just have uBlock Origin picker handy each time her face pops up begging for funds ...

Re: Journalists decry Facebook experiment's impact on democracy

#132

Post by cocktailpeanuts »

pjc50 wrote: post #108
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #69

This tells more about the journalists than Facebook. Facebook has always been the same. It's journalists who sold their soul so that they can make money. Furthermore, it's funny hearing this hypocrisy coming from journalists, since they are the ones who are throwing away their "journalistic integrity" to make money. It's impossible to come across a mainstream publication with unbiased point of view nowadays. They hav…

> It's journalists who sold their soul so that they can make money. Nobody goes into journalism for the money, the pay is terrible. > It's impossible to come across a mainstream publication with unbiased point of view nowadays. Is this actually possible? Does believing in e.g. global warming constitute bias?

> Nobody goes into journalism for the money, the pay is terrible.

I think I should have clarified. When I said "journalists", i used it in the same context as this article.

Which means by "journalists" I meant "journalistic organisations". I have worked with and know many journalists who have high integrity. But at the end of the day it's the organization as a whole that decides what to focus on.

So yeah, from my experience I'm pretty sure they all get into journalism because of their ideal and each journalist as an individual (especially those who work at those top newspapers) has high journalistic integrity, but my impression is that this spirit is dying away as new entrants see what's going on in the ecosystem. It's no secret that these media companies who pride themselves on having high bar for journalistic integrity have started pouring efforts to emulate Buzzfeed (and I'm not using Buzzfeed as symbolism, they have explicitly tried to study Buzzfeed and emulate it)

> Is this actually possible? Does believing in e.g. global warming constitute bias?

I think I mentioned this elsewhere in this thread but I believe this is possible if you hire people from the both ends of the spectrum and write both points of view about the same story. This is impossible at the moment because the entire organization tends to consist of mostly left wing people or mostly right wing people, etc. It's a "company culture" thing, and you can't do this unless you change the company culture fundamentally.

Re: Journalists decry Facebook experiment's impact on democracy

#133

Post by cocktailpeanuts »

acdha wrote: post #122
acdha wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Manifesto Guy was backed up by actual scientists who spoke out to say he'd got the science right, he provided many citations of scientific papers, Thanks for inadvertently providing a great example for why this is so hard: what you said is wrong but recognizing that requires time – simply reading that turgid slog of an essay, recognizing the difference between a blog post or option piece (i.e. most of his citations…

And, to be clear, my point isn’t that you should just trust me but that to a first approximation the average person has no way to distinguish between two random people on the internet. Telling them to do more work seems futile since nobody has time to do that for more than a small number of topics in the news.

I think both of you guys are partially correct, which was my original point.

I never said the Google guy was correct or wrong. In fact, parts of it makes sense and parts of it doesn't.

What irritates me is that people are making a huge fallacy. For example two people can have a whole set of arguments that conflict with one another. Let's assume we can absolutely measure whether a statement is absolutely correct or not. And two people each make their own set of statements about a topic.

Person A: Right - wrong - wrong - Right

Person B: Wrong - Right - Right - Wrong

Instead of A and B sharing their ideas and coming to a conclusion which will be

Right - Right - Right - Right

They keep fighting over small details and say "Because you have this little part that's wrong, your entire argument is wrong" to one another. This will never resolve because they each have errors in their arguments for a fact.

Any humble person would agree that he/she is not a perfect being therefore prone to errors, especially when it comes to complex topics like politics.

Re: Journalists decry Facebook experiment's impact on democracy

#134

Post by marcus_holmes »

peoplewindow wrote: post #117
marcus_holmes wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN, Reddit and FB are all aggregators, not journalists. They are not sources of news, they merely link to it. Producing quality journalism is expensive, the business model doesn't work to pay for the journalists and also pay for our traffic. Having been through this test, our only viable long-term choice here is to gtf off FB. That's going to be extremely painful. Let's hope a few good news sources survive the pain,…

HN/Reddit being aggregators isn't relevant to my point - I derive value from these sites and browse to them directly. If your site was that valuable, people would do the same. Besides, much news in newspapers is also just aggregations of AP/Reuters stories. The vast majority of news sources are actually worse than "shite that's cheap" and optimised for clicks - they're stuffed with lying, manipulation and nonsense de…

> HN/Reddit being aggregators isn't relevant to my point - I derive value from these sites and browse to them directly. If your site was that valuable, people would do the same. Besides, much news in newspapers is also just aggregations of AP/Reuters stories.

It is exactly relevant to your point. You don't derive value from those sites, you derive value from the content those sites link to.

AP/Reuters are also aggregators, they pull stories written elsewhere into a feed that publishers can use.

At some point, somewhere underneath this pile of aggregation, someone needs to actually do some journalism. And get paid for it.

Re: Journalists decry Facebook experiment's impact on democracy

#135

Post by peoplewindow »

pjc50 wrote: post #119
peoplewindow wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reliable by what metric? The FT panders just as hard, it has its own severe biases that result in deeply unreliable reporting. My go-to example of how unreliable the FT can be is an article they published before the Brexit referendum. It said the FT had polled a panel of over 100 "experts" and "leading thinkers". Every single one thought a vote to leave would damage economic growth. In fact economic growth accelerate…

> In fact economic growth accelerated. Really? Are you sure? It's still in the fractional percentage points: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/gdp-growth And some of that article says "medium term". There is still no decision on what Brexit will look like and the number of businesses planning accordingly is increasing. > "Don Smith, deputy chief investment officer at Brown Shipley, said: “The uncertainty ge…

Yes, I'm sure. Look at the claim - it's specific to 2016.

Sterling was 1.3 to the euro just before the vote and is now 1.13

Because the BoE panicked and dropped rates even further, which always hurts the value of a currency. Regardless, my point was about the prediction I specifically named and more generally, the vast wrongness of the FT - a problem that has gone unanalysed and uncorrected, as far as I know.

Re: Journalists decry Facebook experiment's impact on democracy

#136

Post by peoplewindow »

matt4077 wrote: post #125
peoplewindow wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reliable by what metric? The FT panders just as hard, it has its own severe biases that result in deeply unreliable reporting. My go-to example of how unreliable the FT can be is an article they published before the Brexit referendum. It said the FT had polled a panel of over 100 "experts" and "leading thinkers". Every single one thought a vote to leave would damage economic growth. In fact economic growth accelerate…

You're passing judgement on journalism. Yet you can't even distinguish between a paper's opinion, and that of the people it interviews. Specifically, the article you linked to includes the full statements of everyone they asked. You can obviously accuse them of selectively choosing their panel's composition, but (a) it appears this is a group of people they regularly poll, meaning it doesn't have a specific anti-brex…

Of course I can tell the difference. My point is exactly that the FT chose who to interview and who to present as 'leading thinkers', yet they were all wrong, every single one. Clearly the notion that they were 'leading thinkers' was entirely the opinion of the people at the FT and clearly their thinking was anything but high quality.

And (b) I challenge you to find a group of 100 people with similar credentials that reflects your opinion.

100 random members of the British public would have got it more right than this panel did. Obviously gaining a credential in this space results in less ability to analyse the situation, rather than more.

Re: Journalists decry Facebook experiment's impact on democracy

#137

Post by peoplewindow »

matt4077 wrote: post #123
peoplewindow wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN/Reddit being aggregators isn't relevant to my point - I derive value from these sites and browse to them directly. If your site was that valuable, people would do the same. Besides, much news in newspapers is also just aggregations of AP/Reuters stories. The vast majority of news sources are actually worse than "shite that's cheap" and optimised for clicks - they're stuffed with lying, manipulation and nonsense de…

Does reading stuff like this make anyone else weep for the future of humanity? And, since this sort of thinking seems to be quite prevalent on HN: does anyone subscribing to this dystopian view of today's journalism care to provide a single example of a for-profit publisher that they consider high quality? Because all I can think of when I read about "aggregate[d] timely facts" is the phone book.

Ah, insults. The last refuge of the pointless.

Technical and scientific journals, for example, are higher quality than newspapers.

Re: Journalists decry Facebook experiment's impact on democracy

#138

Post by peoplewindow »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #134
peoplewindow wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN/Reddit being aggregators isn't relevant to my point - I derive value from these sites and browse to them directly. If your site was that valuable, people would do the same. Besides, much news in newspapers is also just aggregations of AP/Reuters stories. The vast majority of news sources are actually worse than "shite that's cheap" and optimised for clicks - they're stuffed with lying, manipulation and nonsense de…

> HN/Reddit being aggregators isn't relevant to my point - I derive value from these sites and browse to them directly. If your site was that valuable, people would do the same. Besides, much news in newspapers is also just aggregations of AP/Reuters stories. It is exactly relevant to your point. You don't derive value from those sites, you derive value from the content those sites link to. AP/Reuters are also aggreg…

Hardly. I derive as much value from the comments as the articles themselves most often.

But seeing as you're stuck on the aggregation aspect, I also directly navigate to several news sources.

Re: Journalists decry Facebook experiment's impact on democracy

#139

Post by peoplewindow »

delhanty wrote: post #131
peoplewindow wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Guardian has been pushing the line that non-Guardian news sources are 'dangerous for democracy' for a long time now. Other similar publications like the NYT have the same viewpoint. It's impressive double think: what they mean is, exposure to views they disagree with might cause people to vote against things Guardian writers like and for things Guardian writers dislike, therefore, it's important that such people…

This. The publishing that they did concerning Snowden was important for journalistic freedom. All that stuff stopped after Katherine Viner became editor in 2015. I do read it occasionally - just have uBlock Origin picker handy each time her face pops up begging for funds ...

Yes, I noticed a sharp drop in quality after Rusbridger left too.

Likewise at the Economist. Once Micklethwaite left and was replaced by Minton Beddoes the stories became much less neutral.

Re: Journalists decry Facebook experiment's impact on democracy

#140

Post by peoplewindow »

acdha wrote: post #121
peoplewindow wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your post is indicative of the problem journalists face here. Manifesto Guy was backed up by actual scientists who spoke out to say he'd got the science right, he provided many citations of scientific papers, most of what he wrote was about Google's own culture anyway (and those parts were clearly supported by leaked communications), and in interviews he dwelled on his own firing - a fact. To you it's just "s…

> Manifesto Guy was backed up by actual scientists who spoke out to say he'd got the science right, he provided many citations of scientific papers, Thanks for inadvertently providing a great example for why this is so hard: what you said is wrong but recognizing that requires time – simply reading that turgid slog of an essay, recognizing the difference between a blog post or option piece (i.e. most of his citations…

No, it wasn't wrong. I studied psychology myself years before the Google blowup and similar studies were in the course. The idea that there are biological differences that cause differences in interest is entirely uncontroversial and frankly also common sense. Alternative explanations for why girls don't study computer science are all absurd.

But it's clear that we've reached a point where agreeing on basic scientific facts or even common sense is apparently impossible. You're so filled with hatred for Damore that you can't see past your own biases. You even called it a "turgid slog of an essay", well revealing that you can't even separate the quality of writing from the ideas a piece of writing expounds. You hate the idea that men and women are actually different so much it's become a religion to you. You're a lost cause: far, far beyond science.

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