Algorithms For Fascism

 There's a lot of deserved criticism of how the media has completely and utterly failed the American public over the last nine years when it comes to Donald Trump. Some of it is broken down here by DougJ/Pitchbot and James Fallows.

The great paradox, of course, is that journalists will overwhelmingly vote for Harris and they likely would have done the same for Biden. So why does their coverage suck?

First, there's the fear of allowing that bias of coloring their work. If you generally support Democrats you are going to be very guarded about calling Trump in the grips of fascism and cognitive decline. OK, to a point that's fine. Yes, guard against your biases, but sometimes they are right!

There's an argument that it's all about maintaining access to Republican sources. The thing is, that might explain Maggie Haberman or Olivia Nuzzi, it doesn't explain the Times as a whole.

My feeling is that it all comes back to the media landscape and the difficulty of grabbing readership, market share and ad revenues. Reporting - real reporting - is kind of expensive as it's labor intensive. In order to maintain the staff that the Times has - and that most local newspapers do not - you have to get as many "clicks" as possible. That's how you wind up with headlines that "sanewash" Trump's craziness. 

People's outrage over the Times' abdication of calling Trump what Trump is actually drives some sort of engagement. Even if you cancel your subscription, you might still click through a link on social media and that's the model they rely on.

The fundamental insight of Silicon Valley that outrage drives "engagement" just as much as intellectual interest is going to break our democracy if we aren't careful.

Last Thursday, Jonathan Haidt came to speak to the school about social media and phones and the deleterious impact on children, especially girls. I'm about to turn 58, so I can control somewhat my feeds on social media to people I mostly agree with and Moo Deng. Kids can't filter that way and many other can't either. I probably do spend too much time on Twitter, but I really try not to click on or respond to things that are driven by clickbait. 

The news media used to be about seeking big truths and holding power accountable. Now it seems to be about engaging readers via clickbait headlines that often don't match the text of the article. 

One of the points Haidt made was that when we began the internet age in the '90s and early '00s, there was a lot of hopefulness about the democratization of knowledge. But my students sit in class with a lap top open and I ask a question like "What's the GDP of Canada?" and they stare at me blankly, because that's just not what they use computers for and certainly not what they use their phones for.

I'm not convinced "the Internet was a mistake" but I am convinced social media and the engagement algorithms are.