How media outlets manipulate Facebook's algorithm and ad platform
Over the past decade, select media outlets and foreign entities have often manipulated Facebook’s algorithm and ad platform. Judd Legum, who runs Popular Information, an independent newsletter dedicated to accountability journalism did shed some light on this recently. Through his research, you can see how aggregated pieces of information are designed to push the buttons of the people and how it circulates so quickly on Facebook. It's important that all of us are more media literate and below is a great rundown of how all of this works and why Facebook needs to be held accountable for the misinformation and rage it spreads.
Popular Information newsletter creates change. Check out an overview of the newsletter’s impact over the last three years HERE. Thanks for all your hard work Judd!
2. The DC Enquirer controls a network of large Facebook pages that purport to be independent
They have names like Keep Texas Red ("We are an independent group of concerned Texans who want to help keep Texas from flipping blue") and Conservative Americanshttps://t.co/gzZ7AZX8P1
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) February 24, 2022
4. How do we know these posts are coordinated? The Facebook Pages in the DC Enquirer network publish these articles within seconds of each other with identical messages https://t.co/gzZ7AZFxXt pic.twitter.com/IKv9i8qowu
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) February 24, 2022
6. Let's take the Facebook page of DC Enquirer's founder, Brandon Gill.
Gill is not a particularly famous person.
He has a Twitter account with 55 followers.
He started his Facebook page on 11/6/21 and already has over 1,000,000 followers!https://t.co/gzZ7AZFxXt pic.twitter.com/TajlTM2N5l
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) February 24, 2022
8. According to the Facebook ad library, Facebook pages in the DC Enquirer network have spent between $243,000 and $298,000 on manipulative Facebook ads like these since November.
They appear to violate Facebook's spam policy but it's not being enforcedhttps://t.co/gzZ7AZX8P1 pic.twitter.com/nehglkpYUG
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) February 24, 2022
10. According to CrowdTangle, an analytics service owned by Facebook, links to the DC Enquirer had 2.19 million engagements over the last 10 days
The Washington Post, which employs 1000+ journalists, had 1.49 million engagements in the same 10 dayshttps://t.co/gzZ7AZFxXt
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) February 24, 2022
12. Facebook has also declined to comment on a similar scheme I exposed yesterday that is run by the Conservative Brief, another far-right website.
Conservative Brief has more engagement on Facebook than the New York Times
Details:https://t.co/3ILqrj5bBO
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) February 24, 2022
13. The two schemes are also connected. Brandon Gill, founder and editor of DC Enquirer, "provides strategic marketing direction for Conservative Brief."
Some of the Facebook pages are involved in both schemes. https://t.co/XLM91OIahz
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) February 24, 2022
Too Long Didn't Read Is A Big Problem
I have encountered many online arguments where people are arguing over a headline and if they actually read the story there would be nothing to argue about. I also see a lot of social media posts where it is obvious people commenting did not read the story.
I also have personally been in online arguments where I would share a story providing some background and the person would literally say TL:DR as you can see below.
This is frustrating in the modern era of social media driven news and debate. We can criticize the media for click bait all we want, but if we do not read the story, and only read comments, and the headline we are only part of the problem.
I also encountered this on another story about REI selling their new campus in Bellevue. The story said "Seattle area" and a bulk of the comments were based around people saying "everyone is leaving Seattle" due to the taxes and protests. In reality, the headquarters were in Bellevue and the move had nothing to do with taxes or protests. If you read the story you would see the headquarters are based in Bellevue east of Seattle.
Please go beyond the headline an read the full story. We will all be better of for it.
Save Journalism
Where Do We Start?
The goal of this website is to help spread awareness of ways people are trying to save journalism and educate people on the process of fact checking
Oranizations
Handling images and media with the utmost care is a primary focus of the new editor. Hopefully, you’ll find aspects of adding captions or going full-width with your pictures much easier and robust than before.
Try selecting and removing or editing the caption, now you don’t have to be careful about selecting the image or other text by mistake and ruining the presentation.
The Inserter Tool
Imagine everything that WordPress can do is available to you quickly and in the same place on the interface. No need to figure out HTML tags, classes, or remember complicated shortcode syntax. That’s the spirit behind the inserter—the (+)
button you’ll see around the editor—which allows you to browse all available content blocks and add them into your post. Plugins and themes are able to register their own, opening up all sort of possibilities for rich editing and publishing.
Go give it a try, you may discover things WordPress can already add into your posts that you didn’t know about. Here’s a short list of what you can currently find there:
- Text & Headings
- Images & Videos
- Galleries
- Embeds, like YouTube, Tweets, or other WordPress posts.
- Layout blocks, like Buttons, Hero Images, Separators, etc.
- And Lists like this one of course :)
Visual Editing
A huge benefit of blocks is that you can edit them in place and manipulate your content directly. Instead of having fields for editing things like the source of a quote, or the text of a button, you can directly change the content. Try editing the following quote:
The editor will endeavour to create a new page and post building experience that makes writing rich posts effortless, and has “blocks” to make it easy what today might take shortcodes, custom HTML, or “mystery meat” embed discovery.
Matt Mullenweg, 2017
The information corresponding to the source of the quote is a separate text field, similar to captions under images, so the structure of the quote is protected even if you select, modify, or remove the source. It’s always easy to add it back.
Blocks can be anything you need. For instance, you may want to add a subdued quote as part of the composition of your text, or you may prefer to display a giant stylized one. All of these options are available in the inserter.
You can change the amount of columns in your galleries by dragging a slider in the block inspector in the sidebar.
Media Rich
If you combine the new wide and full-wide alignments with galleries, you can create a very media rich layout, very quickly:
Sure, the full-wide image can be pretty big. But sometimes the image is worth it.
The above is a gallery with just two images. It’s an easier way to create visually appealing layouts, without having to deal with floats. You can also easily convert the gallery back to individual images again, by using the block switcher.
Any block can opt into these alignments. The embed block has them also, and is responsive out of the box:
You can build any block you like, static or dynamic, decorative or plain. Here’s a pullquote block:
Code is Poetry
The WordPress community
If you want to learn more about how to build additional blocks, or if you are interested in helping with the project, head over to the GitHub repository.
Thanks for testing Gutenberg!
Can Facebook save journalism and bring it into the digital age?
Facebook is trying to teach journalists how to thrive in the digital age while also tackling the scourge of fake news. The key lies in helping users tell the difference between truth and lie.
As self-proclaimed authorities on everything specialised, generalists – or (ahem) journalists – don’t like being told how to suck eggs.
But at the same time, those in the media who owe their longevity to being adaptable and rolling with the changes actually relish every opportunity to learn new things. And that’s a metaphor for any profession or trade to thrive in the 21st century.
Can Technology Save Journalism?
Ten years ago, in a moment of characteristic prescience, the Economist asked, “Who Killed Newspapers?” The year was 2006, and already, the Internet posed an existential challenge to an industry that only several decades earlier seemed unassailable. While the question was then, and remains, relevant to the broader world of journalism, the Economist observed that “of all the ‘old’ media, newspapers have the most to lose from the internet.”
[READ THE FULL STORY]
AP Photo/Ted S. Warren
Publishers and journalists must work together to save journalism
Hardly a day passes without an announcement by one newspaper publisher or another that jobs must go, titles must be merged and offices must be closed.
Cutbacks have been the reality of the news trade in Britain for the best part of 20 years at national, regional and local level. And the same story has been unfolding in the USA, Canada, Australia and most European countries.
The cause, as we all know, is the onward march of the digital revolution. We who praise its advance cannot also help but lament its disruption.