Fake News

In Fake News, Ben Thompson at Stratechery argues (and I agree) that:

The reason the media covered Trump so extensively is quite simple: that is what users wanted. And, in a world where media is a commodity, to act as if one has the editorial prerogative to not cover a candidate users want to see is to face that reality square in the face absent the clicks that make the medicine easier to take.

Indeed, this is the same reason fake news flourishes: because users want it. These sites get traffic because users click on their articles and share them, because they confirm what they already think to be true. Confirmation bias is a hell of a drug — and, as Techcrunch reporter Kim-Mai Cutler so aptly put it on Twitter, it’s a hell of a business model.

No feet on the street

But, as I pointed out in Open Access and Surveillance using this graph (via Yves Smith, base from Carpe Diem), there is another problem. Facebook, Google et al have greatly increased the demand for "news" while they sucked the advertising dollars away from the companies that generated actual news. The result has to be a reduction in the quality of news. The invisible hand of the market ensures that a supply of news-like substances arises, from low-cost suppliers to fill the gap.

Thompson concludes:

I am well aware of the problematic aspects of Facebook’s impact; I am particularly worried about the ease with which we sort ourselves into tribes, in part because of the filter bubble effect noted above (that’s one of the reasons Why Twitter Must Be Saved). But the solution is not the reimposition of gatekeepers done in by the Internet; whatever fixes this problem must spring from the power of the Internet, and the fact that each of us, if we choose, has access to more information and sources of truth than ever before, and more ways to reach out and understand and persuade those with whom we disagree. Yes, that is more work than demanding Zuckerberg change what people see, but giving up liberty for laziness never works out well in the end.

Its hard to disagree, but I think Thompson should acknowledge that the idea that "each of us ... has access to more information and sources of truth than ever before" is imperiled by the drain of resources away from those whose job it is to seek out the "sources of truth" and make them available to us.