NewsBeat

October 2018 NewsBeat 19 In modeling the contemporary media ecosystem, it's important to understand that citizens have a whole new set of options beyond voting or marching. Citizens amplify content they like, sending signals back to distributor that they'd like more of the same. They create content that reacts to what's been presented to them, entering the cycle as producers. As a result, they've got vastly more influence over the media agenda than our earlier model. This is only one change producers face in this new model. Most no longer control distribution as tightly as they did in earlier times — unlike newspapers whose companies housed writers and editors, the presses and the delivery trucks in the same building, producers are now one link in a more complex chain. Distribution of content on the internet is free, and attention is scarce, so the power goes not to those who have the presses or the broadcast towers, but to those who control vast audiences: Facebook, Google and the other major media platforms. Anthea Watson Strong, who currently works on local news at Facebook, suggests that people think of these tools as discovery services, more than distributors, because their real power is helping people discover new content, either from their friends or from vast databases of recommendations. These discovery services are attention brokers, making their money from siphoning a fraction of attention off and selling it to advertisers. Unlike the broadcast towers and printing presses, these services are independent of the content producers, and they're far less cooperative about sharing revenues than their predecessors were. Without them, though, many news producers would lose their audiences entirely. "Buckets of Problems" The first bucket of problems comes from these challenges to the business model: how do citizens continue to pay for high-quality journalism when attention and advertising dollars are controlled by discovery engines? There's an understandable and legitimate fear that the "viral cycle" rewards certain types of engaging, popular content at the expense of important though less entertaining content. What's especially at risk is accountability journalism, especially at local levels, which was threatened even in pre-digital days. Only a few dozen people might read the minutes of last night's meeting at City Hall, but it matters immensely that a seasoned political reporter is scanning those notes carefully, looking for possible scandals or abuse and threatening to splash them on the front page, if officials don't behave ethically. It's difficult to know how this essential content is supported in an economy where attention is the scarce commodity — even if news organizations can pay the reporter, her power comes from having an audience to reach. Without high quality journalism, bad deeds go unpunished, power is not balanced with accountability and citizens remain uninformed. One of the disturbing aspects of this situation is that democracy requires not only high quality journalism, but an audience of citizens to consume it. Our problem is not just paying for stories — it may include paying for these stories to reach the audiences who need them if journalism can't win a battle for attention in our discovery engines/attention markets. A second bucket of problems comes from the addictive nature of social media. It's fun to play the game of discovery and amplification, and millions of people are finding it hard to put down their phones long enough to sleep. Tristan Harris has a theory on why this is: these tools have been designed by people who've studied gambling and other addictive phenomena, and they're literally building tools designed to get us hooked on social media. As Tristan and others raise red flags, we are seeing indications that those in the know understand how powerful these tools can be?—? Silicon Valley executives have begun embracing practices of mindfulness, speaking of "time well spent" and ordering their own children to put their phones down. A nation of social media addicts may not be the most fertile field for participatory democracy. Indeed, it may be precisely the environment in which misinformation and mob behavior spreads like an epidemic in a crowded city. But questions remain about how many of these concerns are best understood as the moral panic that often takes hold with the adoption of new technologies, and what problems might genuinely affect how we think about citizenship today. To understand the third and fourth buckets of problems, let me return to the model of new media I'm proposing. While it's likely that no one has a full understanding of the dynamics of this ecosystem and its feedback loops, bad actors are finding ways to inject ideas into the conversation by targeting vulnerable points in the system. Networks of bots amplify stories in ways that make them appear popular with thousands of users, sending false signals to distribution engines that make those stories and topics unduly popular. Content created to silence other voices online through trolling and harassment feeds into the system in much the same way as legitimate comments and reactions. Similarly, disinformation produced either to deceive or to divert attention for profit enters the system disguised as legitimate news. Dark ads allow narrowly targeted content to influence a selected audience without "outsiders" ever seeing it. If there's good news about bad actors, it's that the social media ecosystem would function just fine without them. It's easy to imagine Facebook or Twitter without most kinds of bots, and platforms are already showing an increased (Continued on next page)

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