Weekly Media News
Happy Friday,
This week the focus was intensely on the unprecedented move of platform companies to deplatform and ban President Trump, some for life. Almost all of the 46 stories below thread that needle. This has sparked a new round of debates on freedom of speech and renewed fervor for governance of Big Tech. Add to this, many corporations have pulled political ad funding that fuels much of the social media ads around politics. It is unclear if this includes ideological ads. I’d love to know!
In other news, Axios is licensing its brevity software to companies who want the same brief and glossy newsletter for their comms for $10,000 but even more interesting to us, they have published a bill of rights this morning on how they will cover local news as they launch their local newslettters: No opinions, no bots, all people giving context. Could this work and save local news? Telegram is raising debt to fund its rising demand for its app, Univision becomes the latest major broadcaster to jump into the streaming wars, Medium buys book-club platform Glose, nonprofit Chalkbeat that covers education will launch VoteBeat news site to cover voting rights. Chalkbeat is one of the American Journalism Project darlings funded by a roster of philanthropists, mostly left-leaning. Parler had its data scraped. Murdoch’s New York Post instructed staff to stay away from stories on CNN, MSNBC, NYT and WashPost and Facebook staff have been warned not to wear Facebook clothing that may target them from harm.
Headlines
Axios is expanding into local news this month, and broadening its mission “to help restore trust in fact-based news” with an audience Bill of Rights. – Axios. Promises context only, no opinions, real reporters and not bots or AI telling the story. Exciting to watch.
Comcast’s NBCUniversal News Group announced NBCU Academy, a journalism training and development program that’s set to partner with 17 academic institutions across the U.S. - CNBC. The NBCU Academy launch comes about half a year after Comcast committed to spending $100 million over three years to help combat racism and injustice. NBCU Academy will invest $6.5 million toward the initiative, which includes $3.5 million in scholarships over the next two years.
How to reform the attention economy business model of Big Tech – OpEd by Tristan Harris, MIT Technology Review. Users, not tech executives, should decide what constitutes free speech online. Social media companies aren’t very good at moderating speech. So why do we ask them to? YouTube’s recommendation algorithms, which determine 70% of daily watch time for billions of people, “suggest” what are meant to be similar videos but actually drive viewers to more extreme, more negative, or more conspiratorial content because that’s what keeps them on their screens longer.
Facebook and Twitter Face International Scrutiny After Trump Ban - The New York Times Facebook and Twitter cut off President Trump from their platforms for inciting a crowd that attacked the U.S. Capitol. Those decisions have angered human rights groups and activists, who are now urging the companies to apply their policies evenly, particularly in smaller countries where the platforms dominate communications.
Trump Is Banned. Who Is Next? - OpEd by Harvard’s Berkman Klein Evelyn Douek, The Atlantic. Tech giants must not treat their crackdown on the president’s social accounts as an edge case. The social web should be different now. The attempts to dress up their actions as part of a coherent and deliberate decision-making structure were trying to mask an uncomfortable truth about our most important speech forums: Platforms can and will do what they like.
The Meaning of Trump’s Mass Cancellation - Derek Thompson, The Atlantic. This is how the president’s term ends—with the GOP dithering and CEOs swashbuckling, spared by the “deep state” but impeached in the free market.
Google admits to running 'experiments' which remove some media sites from its search results – The Guardian. The Australian government is attempting to impose a new code on Google and Facebook that would force them to negotiate a fair price for displaying local news content. The Australian Financial Review on Wednesday reported that Google had tweaked its search and news algorithm to bury links to some commercial Australian media outlets for some users.
Blocking the President. Harvard Law experts weigh in on Trump’s social media bans and the potential free speech implications. – Evelyn Douek and Yokai Benkler interviewed by Harvard Gazette.
Employee Pressure Not a Factor in Deplatforming, Tech Companies Say - The Information. Those same companies want to be clear, though: Employee pressure had nothing to do with the steps they’ve taken against prominent right-wing figures and organizations in recent days.
Platform ban of Trump and Parler raises questions about speech and power - OpEd Columbia Journalism Review
How Facebook Incubated the Insurrection - NYT. Facebook’s algorithms have coaxed many Americans into sharing more extreme views on the platform — rewarding them with likes and shares for posts on subjects like election fraud conspiracies, Covid-19 denialism, and anti-vaccination rhetoric. We reviewed the public post histories for dozens of active Facebook users in these spaces. Many, like Mr. McGee, transformed seemingly overnight. A decade ago, their online personas looked nothing like their presence today.
Big Tech Censors Trump After Capitol Riots - OpEd National Review
Donald Trump shows the US needs a European approach to online regulation - OpEd Tow Center’s Emily Bell in The Financial Times
We are entering a new era of social media regulation. OpEd by HKS Dipayan Ghosh. – HBR
Eleven Journalists on Covering the Capitol Siege: ‘This Could Get Ugly’ - NYT. We interviewed 11 journalists from a variety of outlets — including The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the British channel ITV and the Beltway news site Axios — who covered the events. The interviews have been edited and condensed.
Germany shows the EU the way in curbing Big Tech – POLITICO
How right-wing media explained the pro-Trump siege of the Capitol - Axios
“We are not just a country divided. Disagreement is a luxury of a shared reality that we don’t have,” OpEd by Nancy Gibbs. HKS report.
Tech on trial in 2021. – Financial Times. Bigger budgets for antitrust regulators will help ramp up the scrutiny of internet giants.
Facebook Cares About Money, Not Values – Another OpEd by Dipayan Ghosh at HKS, Foreign Policy
Following Trump Ban, Facebook Tells Employees to Avoid Wearing Company-Branded Apparel — The Information
NYT Ben Smith on a former Buzzfeed colleague who understood social media and its powers. Last Week, He Stormed the Capitol - NYT
How Parler, a Chosen App of Trump Fans, Became a Test of Free Speech - NYT. By Saturday night, Apple and Google had removed Parler from their app stores and Amazon said it would no longer host the site on its computing services, saying it had not sufficiently policed posts that incited violence and crime.
New York Post to Staff: Stay Away From CNN, MSNBC, New York Times and Washington Post - NYT
Cumulus Media orders conservative radio hosts to temper election fraud rhetoric - WashPost
The Last Trump Tweet Against the Media – U.S. Press Freedom Tracker. By the time the social media platform Twitter permanently suspended his account on Jan. 8, 2021, President Donald Trump had posted 2,520 tweets degrading journalists and the media as a whole. The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker houses a database of Trump’s anti-media tweets that dates back to June 15, 2015, the date Trump declared his candidacy for president. According to our analysis of nearly 24,500 of Trump’s tweets across that time, 2,520 anti-press tweets means that he has, on average, tweeted negatively about the press more than once a day for the past 5 ½ years.
How the press can hold Trump’s enablers—and itself—to account – Columbia Journalism Review.
Google pausing all political ads following Capitol siege - Axios
E.U.'s Vestager says new tech regulations would address Trump, disinformation, has mixed feelings on the Twitter ban - WashPost. Europe's top digital enforcer said Tuesday that she didn't understand why Twitter, Facebook and other social media networks had waited so long to bar President Trump from their platforms — but she also said that a broad proposal in Europe to rein in digital giants would give banned users the opportunity to appeal such decisions.
Stripped of Twitter, Trump Faces a New Challenge: How to Command Attention - Maggie Haberman, NYT
Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment - The Verge. Podcast interview with Daphne Keller, director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, and we’re talking about a big problem: how to moderate what happens on the internet.
Sandberg says U.S. Capitol riot was 'largely' not organized on Facebook - CNBC
Trump and the Capitol Mob: The Science of Unleashing – By Harvard’s Cass Sunstein Bloomberg
President Trump lashes out at social media companies following Twitter ban - WashPost
The online right is moving underground – Axios. A recent update to the privacy policy of Facebook-owned WhatsApp has prompted user worry that their data and communications aren't secure there. That — and an Elon Musk tweet late last week urging "Use Signal" — likely accounts for at least part of the pop.But experts say far-right users are undeniably flocking to those platforms, where they can in some cases communicate in total secrecy.
Trump’s Twitter ban is a step toward ending the hijacking of the First Amendment – OpEd Boston Globe by David Golumbia, associate professor of digital studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, is the author of “The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism.” Tech companies and other digital advocates typically resist regulation by saying they’re standing up for freedom of speech. But they’ve been pushing a warped version of the idea.
Bellingcat breaks stories that newsrooms envy — using methods newsrooms avoid - WashPost
The Truth About Your WhatsApp Data – NYT
Chalkbeat, a nonprofit news organization that covers education at the local level, plans to expand its pop-up newsroom, Votebeat, to cover voting at the local level through the 2022 midterm elections. – Axios Jessica Huseman, formerly of ProPublica’s ElectionLand, will serve as editorial director of the project.
Political donations: PAC animals – Opinion Lex in FT. The influence of big money is not a laudable feature of US democracy. More critical thinking about how companies make donations is long overdue. Influence-peddling extends far beyond simple corporate PAC contributions. Individual donations, contributions routed via so-called “dark money” non-profits, and increasingly small-dollar mass fundraising are also crucial to candidate fundraising. But companies provide a reliable drip-feed of cash.
Telegram Founder in Talks to Raise Debt Amid App’s Explosive Growth — The Information. After rival WhatsApp changed its privacy terms, The Dubai-based startup, which has yet to generate revenue and has been mostly funded to date by co-founder Pavel Durov’s personal fortune, has discussed with banks and investors raising hundreds of millions of dollars in debt that would convert to shares in an eventual public offering.
Voice of America employees protest order to broadcast Pompeo speech, calling it ‘propaganda’ – WashPost
Univision, the largest Spanish-language broadcaster in the U.S., will announce the launch of "PrendeTV," a free, ad-supported streaming service – Axios.
Before Substack, there was Medium — and its network is about to get bigger - CNN. Substack has become synonymous with writers looking to go independent. But for many years prior, there was a different go-to place for self-publishing: Medium. Now, Medium is pivoting to authors, rather than journalists.
Medium is acquiring Glose, a digital platform for buying, reading and discussing books. Glose's 20 employees, most of whom are based in Paris, will join Medium. Glose CEO Nicolas Princen will become vice president of books at Medium. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Podcast with @benedictevans @ToniCowanBrown on "data". Good context on the actual issues people are discussing around data privacy and regulation.
There are now over 250 nonprofit media outlets in the US that have registered with the Institute of Non-Profit News (INN). Many have a specific focus. Here is the map.
I have begun a media ownership directory in the US that includes print, digital, TV, and radio and arranges them by publicly traded, nonprofit, private owner, hedge fund owner, government-funded. It will also attempt to list the top majority-voting shareholders or donors. I believe could be very useful for us one day.