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Posted in Deception at 8:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Image: Microsoft News Archives at Phoronix
Summary: Information on the World Wide Web, including censorship hubs known as social control media, is getting hard to find; in the midst of “tweets” and “TikTok anecdotes” we very rarely see any truly fascinating breaking stories and investigative journalism; to make matters worse, many sites lie intentionally
THE media in the UK is perhaps least trusted among people of the same country. By some measures, the UK is in last place in Europe, as measured among the domestic population. It’s not a new problem and the subject was being raised a lot back in the dawn of the Brexit referendum, in which many voters relied on lies. The problem is so severe that I refuse to access any mainstream ‘news’ site in the UK. Many others who live here feel the same way. That’s a lot worse/lower than in east European countries and this new survey says, as per the Press Gazette [1]: “Trust in news in the UK was at 33%, joint 12th lowest among 46 markets.”
> “The problem is so severe that I refuse to access any mainstream ‘news’ site in the UK.”
The Press Gazette also says [2] “UK science publisher Texere acquired by Broadcast Med” (everything is up for sale; the biggest papers in the UK are also being sold and our former Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, will write for a notorious tabloid which spreads lie).
The United States has a similar problem, but the media culture there is different from Europe’s and some clueless politicians try to pass new laws that would further kill the press, not just the Net. Public Knowledge wrote about this twice a few days ago [3-4].
> “This past weekend I spent endless time working on tools to better curate the news, seeing that about 90% of the “news” in my RSS feeds are worthless junk and perhaps 5% are actually important.”
Social control media won’t replace “the media”. We wrote about Reddit, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook in recent days and they all struggle. See the new article [5] entitled “Website Owners Say Traffic Is Plummeting After a Facebook Algorithm Change” (Facebook sees decline in active users and will thus try to retain what’s left of them inside the walled garden).
This past weekend I spent endless time working on tools to better curate the news, seeing that about 90% of the “news” items in my RSS feeds are worthless junk and perhaps 5% are actually important. This means that it’s very time-consuming to actually find real news. The media online will die if it does not even try to be media and instead resorts to clickbait (see Phoronix screenshot at the top). The national media in Singapore, for example, decided that a couple remarrying is somehow news worthy of national attention. Among the other headlines there we have “Malaysians poke fun at $1,600 Versace shirt that resembles uniform of nasi kandar restaurant chain” and some other gossip (I saw several more today). This results in time-wasting.
> “It is only getting worse over time.”
To give an example from the domain of technology, about 80% of Tom’s Hardware is now marketing SPAM, not articles. Tom’s Hardware has become more or less a sales site. The remaining articles are more like “filler” for the real content, which is SPAM. It is truly a shame because Tom’s Hardware used to be (once upon a time) an awesome Web site with truly clueful authors, not chaff composers.
Some time later I wish to do videos to highlight this problem using some examples and show how I use some code to partly alleviate it. It is only getting worse over time. Trust in the media is one problem; signal-to-noise ratio is another. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
Trust in news in the UK was at 33%, joint 12th lowest among 46 markets.
Texere Publishing was founded “around a kitchen table” in Knutsford.
Public Knowledge joined a letter urging Senate leadership not to pass the JCPA.
The bill would do nothing to help preserve local journalism while compounding some of the biggest problems in our media landscape.
It’s a troubling change in an increasingly frail digital news business, where companies have little choice but to rely on social media’s biggest gatekeeper. Publishers say they deserve transparency, but as with similar changes in the past, there’s been no communication from Meta, Facebook’s parent company. In fact, Meta did not respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment on the matter.
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