<
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/11/social-media-news-readership-decline/675890/>
"Over the past decade, Silicon Valley has learned that news is a messy,
expensive, low-margin business—the kind that, if you’re not careful, can turn a
milquetoast CEO into an international villain and get you dragged in front of
Congress.
No surprise, then, that Big Tech has decided it’s done with the enterprise
altogether. After the 2016 election, news became a bug rather than a feature, a
burdensome responsibility of truth arbitration that no executive particularly
wanted to deal with. Slowly, and then not so slowly, companies divested from
news. Facebook reduced its visibility in users’ feeds. Both Meta and Google
restricted the distribution of news content in Canada. Meta’s head of
Instagram, Adam Mosseri, noted that its newest social network, Threads,
wouldn’t go out of its way to amplify news content. Elon Musk destroyed
Twitter, apparently as part of a reactionary political project against the
press, and made a number of decisions that resulted in its replacement, X,
being flooded with garbage. As
The New York Times declared recently, “The
major online platforms are breaking up with news.”
This is correct, but the narrative is missing something. Journalists tend to
fixate on how our work is or isn’t distributed. Doing so allows us to believe
that algorithms and shortsighted, mercurial tech executives are fully to blame
when our work isn’t consumed. Fair enough: Platforms, especially Facebook, have
encouraged news organizations to redefine their publishing strategies in the
past, including through disastrous pivots to video, only to change directions
with an algorithm update or the falsification of key metrics. They’ve also
allowed their platforms to be used for dangerous propaganda that crowds out
legitimate information. But there is also a less convenient and perhaps more
existential side to tech’s divestiture of news. It’s not just the platforms:
Readers are breaking up with traditional news, too."
Via
Garbage Day: New MrBeast charity tantrum dropped
https://www.garbageday.email/p/new-mrbeast-charity-tantrum-dropped
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
