Tag: Mark Zuckerberg

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

The Search for Truth

Information is power, but disinformation is also power. We’ve learned this the hard way over the past 18 months.

Not so long ago, we read newspapers and watched the national television news to gain our information. We all got our news from what was meant to be one of the cornerstones of our democracy — the free press. That’s no longer the case.

Facebook, Twitter, and other social media have changed everything. Facebook, in particular, has become a central focal point for information — and disinformation — distribution. And it’s how we — you and me and most everyone you know — built Facebook and made Mark Zuckerberg rich and powerful. He owes everything to us and the content we provide.

That’s because Facebook needs “content” like a zombie needs brains. It survives and grows by providing a constant stream of information. When you go to your Facebook page, there’s always something new. And that’s because millions of people, here and around the globe, helpfully feed Facebook with fresh content.

Sure, there are your vacation pictures and ubiquitous videos of frisky cats and cute goats, but much of that content consists of links to news articles and opinion pieces.

The problem is that it’s all presented like a veggie platter at your office party — a news story from The Washington Post, a video from Alex Jones, a Breitbart “expose,” a Flyer editor’s column — it’s all just consumable content to Facebook, a way to keep you coming back for more. Content is king.

But if content is king, those who present the content are the king-makers, the ultimate arbiters of what the public consumes as “news.” And what we’ve learned the hard way is that our new content distribution systems can be gamed. They can be gamed by Facebook algorithms that ensure you see ads that tempt you over and over to buy that pair of Timberlands you looked at on Zappos.com. And they can be gamed by bad actors who buy information about your interests and opinions and target you with content that shapes your worldview, that drives and reinforces your political disposition just as effectively as Zappo’s can shape your desire to buy those Timberlands.

These days, the truth is just another product. It’s available, but it’s queued up in your Facebook feed next to all the other products: lies, disinformation, propaganda, huckster schemes, and cat videos.

This is a dangerous and vulnerable situation for a democratic republic that relies on an informed public to set the course for its leaders. It’s exacerbated by the decline of the country’s traditional bastions of reliable information — its daily newspapers. With few exceptions, our great city newspapers have shrunk to shells of their former glory days; they have fewer reporters, fewer pages, and fewer subscribers.

How many Harvey Weinsteins and Roy Moores are out there? If not for the New York Times and Washington Post, we wouldn’t have learned of either man’s sordid past. However flawed those newspapers are, they are essential to our democracy.

Without the free press, propaganda becomes easier. Lies can be repeated without fear of rebuttal. Agendas that serve only to further empower the already powerful are easier to get away with.

For example, polling tells us that 77 percent of Americans wanted net neutrality, but the powerful didn’t want it, so it went away. A great majority of Americans were opposed to the GOP tax plan, but we got it anyway, because the corporations who own Congress wanted it. Most Americans do not want to see the Affordable Care Act destroyed, but millions of Americans are about to lose health insurance or pay much higher premiums. The vast majority of Americans want stricter gun laws, but the NRA doesn’t and the NRA controls Congress.

If the will of the people can be so easily ignored, the system is broken. If we the people don’t control our own Congress, we’ve lost our country. I believe we’re at a tipping point, here on the precipice of 2018. Great crises loom. The current situation — with a president who appears to be mentally unfit for the office and a Congressional majority that appears to have sold its soul for manna — can’t be allowed to stand. We all need to seek the truth — and speak the truth to power. The future of our country lies in the balance. Happy New Year. Saddle up.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Playing the Long Game

According to a report released this week by the Pew Research Center and Knight Foundation, more than 40 percent of American adults get news through Facebook. What’s left unsaid in that study is that the definition of “news” is pretty loose — and getting looser.

What pops up on most Americans’ Facebook feeds is a motley conglomeration of photo memes, opinion pieces, videos of friends’ kids and pets, family vacation photos, unsourced clickbait articles, happy birthday wishes, music videos, and politically driven propaganda. “News” can be anything from a link to a well-sourced Washington Post story about Hillary Clinton’s emails to an Alex Jones Newsmax rant about how the CIA uses jet contrails to control the weather.

If you get your news from Facebook, your Facebook “friends” are now your news editors, assisted by Facebook algorithms designed to feed you ads and articles matched to your buying and browsing habits.

When you do come across legitimate news on Facebook, please take note of where it comes from. If it’s national or international news, I’ll wager it’s from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Wall Street Journal, The London Times, the Guardian, or other reputable sources. And I’ll also wager that if you see a legitimate local news story on your Facebook feed, it will almost always be from The Commercial Appeal or The Memphis Flyer.

You’re quite welcome. Hope you enjoy the free content. I know Mark Zuckerberg and his legion of doom certainly appreciate the money they’re making off the work that legitimate journalists do. Yes, Facebook sends readers to our web-pages to read our stories, but it’s pretty clear who’s making the big money on the Internet.

Every week, I get emails and calls from people representing local businesses and organizations — restaurants, clubs, concert venues, new enterprises, nonprofits — asking the Flyer to do a story about them or their client. Why do they do this? Because they know the Flyer has a 93 percent or higher pickup rate each week. They know hundreds of thousands of readers visit our website each month. They know our readers are smart, affluent, and influential. And, most important, they know an impartial story in the Flyer legitimizes their cause or their client. That’s because it’s perceived as news, not PR fluff.

Often, these folks have a good story — a new chef, a big band coming to town, a fresh business concept, a meaningful cause, a can’t-miss event — so I assign a reporter, and we do a story that runs in the paper (and online, as all our stories do). Everyone’s happy. The publicist gets publicity for his client; we get an interesting story; our readers learn something new about their city.

Well, almost everybody is happy. Often, when a Flyer sales rep calls on one of those businesses we’ve written a story about, they’re told: “We’re not going to advertise. We’re just doing social media.” And I bet you can guess what material those clients use in their social media campaigns. Yep, the Flyer story that was written about them.

Let me be clear: There’s no quid pro quo. We don’t write stories to get advertisers. Never have, never will. But here’s my point: It is a symbiotic relationship. Local businesses and citizens need local media to tell their stories and report the news about their city — and yes, provide “content” for social media. Likewise, local media need local businesses to value and support their work and to invest in that process. It’s good business in the short run, yes, but it’s also about the long game: making sure local media can continue to do their job. Think local. Buy local. Be local.

Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t give a crap about you or about Memphis or about the media that serve this city. And he sure as hell isn’t going to write about you.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Letter from the Editor: Song of Myself

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

— Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

Did Walt Whitman predict Facebook? Given the uncanny descriptive accuracy of the opening lines to Song of Myself, it certainly appears so.

Scrolling through my Facebook “newsfeed,” it occurs to me that it is almost entirely a catalogue of my friends and acquaintances “singing” themselves. It’s the ultimate in branding, only we are both the ad agency and the product. We’re marketing ourselves, consciously or not, creating a self-portrait that we want others to see — our triumphs, our beautiful children, our vacations, funny goofs, moments of pride and joy, even times of pain and loss.

In a closet in my house are boxes and boxes of photos, stacked on shelves and on the floor, almost all of them taken before 2007 — before smartphones, before all our photos were on our computers or mobile devices or sent to the “cloud,” wherever the hell that is. (That cloud must be getting heavy, is all I can say. Our trip to France last year had to have added several zillion gigabytes.)

I remember when you’d go to someone’s house for dinner and after dessert, the host would say what were at that time the most dreaded words in the English language: “Would you like to see the slides of our vacation?”

“No, we wouldn’t,” we thought. But “yes, of course, we would,” we said. Then, lights dimmed, we’d sit staring at photos of sunsets, seaside dinners, cathedrals, hotel pools, that crazy waiter that spilled the Pinot Grigio on Merle, etc. What fun.

Now, if you want to see someone’s vacation photos, well, you can just go to their Facebook page and click through them — and, most important, you can stop any time.

And I feel sure Facebook is responsible for the death of those interminable “our family’s year in review” letters you used to get from friends at Christmas. For that alone, we owe Mark Zuckerberg large thanks. We already have everyone’s year in review at our fingertips, if we choose to look.

You can learn a lot from looking at your Facebook friends’ profiles: their favorite movies, books, albums, their relationship status, their family members. And, more interesting, at least to me, you learn what they value and how they want to be perceived by the world. Foodies post lots of food pictures. Political junkies post political stuff. Music people post music and videos. Young parents post baby pictures. There are sports people, funny socks people, pet people, travel people, religious/inspirational people, funny meme people, and people who update their profile picture three times a week. You are what you post.

“I celebrate myself, and sing myself,” wrote Whitman. And it was never more true, never more universal. Though, today, he’d probably post his masterpiece online and call it, “Song of My Selfie.”

Bruce VanWyngarden

brucev@memphyer.com