"A million ad impressions being served onto websites is the equivalent of a return flight from London to Boston in terms of the [carbon] emissions being given out. If you think about how many billions and billions of impressions are being served on a daily basis, we do have a problem..."
#WillieJackson, Minister of Broadcasting and Media, comments on the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill, that will force one set of media corporations to pay another set of media corporations, to link to or quote from their stories.
"Any right thinking person or right thinking party would support this, because you don't want to get offside with the media do you..."
If the headlines on your information sources are not the climate crisis, threat of fascism, seriousness of Covid, guns #1 cause of death for children and inequality you should ask yourself why that is.
"Broadcasting Minister Willie Jackson has quietly tabled a long-awaited bill aimed at shoring up dwindling media company revenues by forcing tech firms to pay for news content that appears on their sites."
I don't support this typically timid, piecemeal, Labour party policy. It leaves the online ad oligopoly unaffected, but just forces it to share a sliver of its ill-gotten gains. @pluralistic nailed it here:
"Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has in recent days fiercely criticised Meta for barring access to critical safety information about a spate of wildfires, which is being disseminated by news companies.
...Meta has told Canadian news outlets that users can still access safety messages from government agencies and emergency services."
The loosening of ownership rules in 80s and 90s (and started with Reagan and continued through Trump) set the stage. But that didn't make what happened inevitable. There are lots of culprits. Rupert Murdoch is a big part of that.
Last night I shared two posts. The first was positive (Fred Rogers) & the second was abysmal (normalized gun violence).
On #Twitter, I suspect the latter would have garnered far more attention bc a race for publicly visible RTs, likes & follows favors promoting shock & outrage.
But here on #Mastodon, Mister Rogers wisdom was shared more widely.
This isn’t a scientific analysis but a mere observation reinforcing that social media will be what we make it. And I like this neighborhood.
We live in a #NewsMedia world populated by relentlessly negative #news stories.
The for-profit sector of #journalism understands that news which activates the fear centers of our brain, tends to get more attention. What that says about us humans, is an interesting question. Theories abound 😜
Sadly this has left many of us with a distorted and fearful world view.
There are many good things happening which are all too rarely reported.
My article on the high level of education of youtubers. If you know of a fact-based youtuber, please let me know. I am trying to identify as many as I can
"We've set up a Mastodon server for the BBC to publish content in the Fediverse... Unlike most Mastodon servers where you can sign up for a personal account, we're only using this instance to host BBC accounts; it’s a place for us to publish in the Fediverse. If you have a Mastodon (or other ActivityPub) account from another server, then you can easily follow our accounts."
"When the bombing occurred last month at the Boston marathon, even the mainstream media including CNN, CNBC and ABC started to stereotype the origin of those involved in the incident, initially suggesting some ‘non-American’ people with ‘dark skin’ were behind this."
#NathanLean, Editor-in-Chief, Aslan Media, Research at Georgetown University, 2013
Read all about it. Washington Post report on a study, written by a "journalist" who has no idea how internet technology works if it isn't run by a corporation, and imposes culturally-specific judgements on internet use by people in other cultures, with different ethical frameworks. Honestly, this study could have been titled 'researchers shocked to find dodgy stuff on dodgy little websites':
The Working Group this week is short one Bomber Bradbury, so the host and panel are all on the right. This episode is a fantastic window into the many disagreements within the the NZ right.
Fascinating that none of them are as opposed to rebalancing the tax system as you might expect. So where is the anti-tax discourse dominating the news media really coming from?
"Never wrestle with a pig. You just get dirty and the pig enjoys it." - Anonymous
People calling themselves "journalists" are wrestling with a pig (the Shitbird site), they are getting dirty, and the pig is enjoying it.
I've read the article below, and what I take out of it is that the vast majority of journalism is bread and circuses. As bread and circuses, they are quite happy to stay on the Shitbird site, because what they peddle is entertainment and not actually journalism.
It is really not hard to have a real presence in the Fediverse. If a news outlet or a journalist has no presence in the Fediverse, that is because THEY DO NOT CARE to be here.
Nothing else.
But if what they peddle is bread and circuses, maybe they should stay there.
Perhaps this is a rather #coldtake (not that hot takes are any good), but Meta banning Canadian news media is some solid authoritarian dystopia stuff. Social media companies have effectively concocted a back door around the Canadian charter by creating absolute market share through private platforms to impose a virtual dictatorship on media.
Canada really should ban Meta because of the threat it poses to what little democracy we have. If we must have a state, surely this is what it ought to be good for. Right? But Canadians are not really going to care, because we are all pretty accustomed to being dominated by monopolies. I mean, this country is like five or six value chain monopolies, on violently stolen land, wrapped in a flag. With the exception CBC, our major media companies are owned by private equity firms. This status quo simply cannot persist if we actually value democracy. #cdnpoli#meta#newsmedia
We live in a #NewsMedia culture which gravitates towards the sensational and fear inducing.
#News companies know that the deep squirrely part of our brain gravitates towards the lurid and the scary. So they keep serving up a steady diet of misery
For every bad story, there are likely as many or more #GoodNews stories, we just don’t see them in our #NewsFeeds unless we purposefully change our feeds
Here’s a site that falls into the more hopeful category:
The Dutch government is now running their own Mastodon server
In translation, it talks about "value-driven alternatives to social media"
The message I'd like to see governments adopt is a little different: "digital communications is a critical part of civil communication and the government should not be running on corporate platforms"
The Online News Act requires Google & Meta to enter into agreements with news publishers to pay them for news content that appears on their sites if it helps them generate money.
...
Meta has started blocking news for some Canadians on its Facebook & Instagram platforms in response to a Liberal government bill that could soon become law
Comment: support independent, investigative journalism; local news; ...
Algorithms serving Canadian news to social media platforms have contributed to the big tech cash pile as Canadian reporters face mass layoffs & journalism is undergoing a financial crisis. ... these companies do not have the public interest at heart.
...
Day 177 and #Twitter users are surprised that #ElonMusk’s decision to remove #bluecheck validation is causing chaos and the creation of impersonation accounts. That could never have been predicted?
#Decentralized#SocialMedia is the solution for exposure to willful and arbitrary behavior by egomaniacal billionaires
Increasingly the #Twitter/ #X platform is becoming increasingly hostile to members of the #NewsMedia and yet members of the profession cling to the corrupted platform.
@ZhiZhu Shouldn't there be a criterion when choosing these accounts? right-left, progressive-conservative, or classical journalism? or is it random? Personally, I want to follow all the colors of the world, but basically I want to get accurate news. I'd like to say "critical" too, but in news media labeled as critical sometimes that's more vulgar criticism than news. I'm asking because it's hard to check all of them one by one, you don't need to answer :) #newsmedia#newstodon