#MEDIA MONOPOLIES

[ridenwithbiden]

from 2022

[rank-sentimentalist]

A week after an AI-generated high school football game recap went viral, Gannett is pausing its use of an artificial intelligence sports writing tool in local outlets, per Axios.

The article in question was a recap of the football game between Ohio schools Westerville North and Westerville Central. The article’s robotic style and lack of personality set off social media as people from all around the sports media world not only ripped it to shreds but also held it up as an example of why this is a bad look for the newspaper industry.

(a bit later on)

“This local AI sports effort is being paused,” a Gannett spokesperson tells Axios. “In addition to adding hundreds of reporting jobs across the country, we are experimenting with automation and AI to build tools for our journalists and add content for our readers. We are continually evaluating vendors as we refine processes to ensure all the news and information we provide meets the highest journalistic standards.”

[auressea]

"This is the power the Israeli military has over the news, the control the US government exerts over every outlet, and the proof there is no unbiased reporting on Israel/Palestine. Our only accurate source is the civilian journalists being killed in Gaza and having their access to the outside world cut off."

I don't usually talk about Israel/Palestine, but as an Israeli citizen who doesn't support genocide, I need to speak out.

We're seeing, on a massive scale, news websites release articles saying "Israel bombs hospital in Gaza" and revising it to "Israel, Hamas trade blame for hospital bombing in Gaza". Every single news site is doing the same thing.

New York Times, original headline:

New York Times, new headline:

Business Insider, original headline: Hamas says Israeli forces bombed a hospital and killed hundreds of people. The UN has documented dozens of other attacks on healthcare in Gaza." New headline:

Reuters, original headline:

Reuters, new headline:

Politico, original headline:

Politico, new headline:

Boston Globe, original headline:

Boston Globe, new headline:

Financial Times, original headline:

Financial Times, new headline:

Daily Beast, old headline:

Daily Beast, new headline:

Every single news site is changing their headlines, but instead of admitting the correction as is done in every single other instance of this updating, they are acting as if this was always their headline. Note the repeated use of "Hamas and Israel trade blame" in the new headlines. This is the power the Israeli military has over the news, the control the US government exerts over every outlet, and the proof there is no unbiased reporting on Israel/Palestine. Our only accurate source is the civilian journalists being killed in Gaza and having their access to the outside world cut off.

(Before this is reposted and I am accused of being a self-hating Israeli citizen and Jew, I need Zionists to understand that the US military is not Judaism, and making the leap from "the US government exerts control over a lot of media" to "Jews control the media" shows more about you than me.)

[hinamie]

I don't want to regret the way I lived

[newsfromstolenland]

Atlantic Canada's largest newspaper chain is now officially owned by Toronto-based Postmedia Network Inc.

On Monday, Postmedia confirmed the closing of its $1-million purchase of SaltWire Network Inc. and the Halifax Herald Ltd. in a short statement on its website. The sale was approved by a Nova Scotia Supreme Court judge on Aug. 8.

Andrew MacLeod, Postmedia's president and CEO, said his company is "delighted" to welcome the new media properties, saying the sale "preserves their vital role within the community."

Full article

Let's explore why this is a very bad thing.

Postmedia, the company that just bought a chain of over two dozen Atlantic canada newspapers, is known for many things- none of them good.

This is an incomplete list of harmful things that Postmedia and its executives have done/are known for:

Right-wing politics. "The National Post was founded in 1998 by Conrad Black, who has connections to conservative politics and sat as a Conservative Party member of the United Kingdom's House of Lords. The Post has always been aligned with the right side of the political spectrum. ..."Just in the past couple of years, Postmedia has issued an edict stating that they should move even farther to the right, so they're very reliably conservative," said [Media journalist Marc] Edge. "In fact, [they] endorse Conservative candidates often over the objections of their local editors.""

Union busting. "They employed a mix of cajoling (such as with buyouts and raises), entreaties to preserve the paper’s uniquely collegial newsroom culture, office-wide memos decrying the havoc a union would wreak, and, according to CWA Canada President Martin O’Hanlon, one-on-one meetings between staff and management."

Monopolization of canadian news media. "Postmedia Network’s purchase of Saltwire Network will extend its grip from coast to coast, as it already dominates Western Canada with eight of the nine largest dailies in the three westernmost provinces. This purchase will give Postmedia the largest dailies in Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland to go along with the largest in New Brunswick, which it acquired from the Irving Oil family two years ago."

Cuts to pensions and benefits while giving large bonuses to executives. "...several top Postmedia executives had received enormous retention bonuses at a time of aggressive belt-tightening (after which many left regardless), and second, the March 2017 announcement that benefits and pensions would be curtailed significantly."

Already beginning to lay off staff from the Atlantic canada newspapers they now own. "...the long-term future of workers in departments like circulation, advertising, customer service, finance and production remains uncertain. "Staff believe maintaining local jobs in the community is critical to retaining both subscribers and clients," the union said. Last week, the union representing workers at The Telegram confirmed that four of the paper's 13 newsroom positions will be eliminated."

More reading: source 1, source 2

Tagging: @allthecanadianpolitics

[the-irreverend]

Now we see the stupidity inherent in the system (that is modern copyright law.)

[dapper-nahrwhale]

Seeing Shrek on Disney plus is something that makes my stomach sink in a pit oh it's not how it's supposed to be. Shrek is a satirical parody mocking Disney and Disney owns it now... I'm so tired of playing monopoly can we do something else please

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Saving the news from Big Tech with end-to-end social media

Big Tech steals from the news, but it doesn’t steal *content* — it steals *money*. In “Saving the News From Big Tech,” a series for EFF, I’ve documented how tech monopolies in ad-tech and app stores result in vast cash transfers from the news to tech, starving newsrooms and gutting reporting:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech

Now we’ve published the final part, describing how social media platforms hold audiences hostage, charging media companies to reach the subscribers who asked to see what they have to say. And, as with the previous installments, we set out a proposal for forcing tech companies to end this practice, putting more money in the pockets of news producers:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-need-end-end-web

The issue here is final stage of the enshittification cycle: first, platforms offer good deals and even subsidies to lure in end users. Then, once the users are locked in, platforms offer similarly good deals to business users (in this case, publishers, but see also Uber drivers, Amazon sellers, YouTube performers, etc) to lure them in. Once *they’re* locked in, the platform flips the script: it withdraws subsidies from both end users and business customers (e.g. news readers and news publishers) and forces both groups to pay to continue to transact with each other.

In the case of the news and Big Tech, that process goes like this. First a platform like Facebook offers users a surveillance-free alternative to MySpace, where the deal is simple: tell us who matters to you on this site, and we’ll show you what they post:

https://lawcat.berkeley.edu/record/1128876?ln=en

Users pile in and lock themselves in, through the “collective action problem” — the difficulty of convincing all your friends to leave, and to agree on where to go:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

Then Facebook turns on the surveillance they promised they’d never engage in, and also begins to promise media companies that it will nonsensually cram their posts down readers’ eyeballs, luring in both advertisers and publishers. Users don’t like their diluted feeds, or the surveillance, or the ads, but they like each other, and the collective action problem keeps them from leaving.

As publishers and advertisers grow increasingly dependent on Facebook, Facebook makes the deal worse for both. Ad prices go up, as does ad-fraud, meaning advertisers pay ever more for ads that are ever less likely to be shown to a user.

Publishers’ “reach” is curtailed unless they put ever-larger excerpts onto Facebook, until they eventually must publish whole articles verbatim on the platform, making it a substitute for their web presence, rather than a funnel to drive traffic to their own sites. Facebook caps this off by downranking any post that includes a link to the public web, forcing publishers into the conspiracy to make “Facebook” synonymous with “the internet.”

Then, in end-stage enshittification, publishers’ reach is curtailed altogether. They are told — either explicitly or implicitly — that they have to pay to “boost” their material to reach the subscribers who asked to see it.

With social media ransom, tech finds a way to steal money from publishers no matter how they make that money. Tech monopolists command 51% of ever ad dollar. Tech monopolists rake off 30% of every in-app subscription dollar. And social media companies demand danegeld (“verification,” “boosting,” etc) from publishers who want to reach the audiences that asked to see their materials.

This isn’t just bad for publishers, it’s also bad for audiences. You joined the platform to see the feeds you subscribed to, but the platform gradually replaces more and more of your feed with ads and content from randos who pay to “boost” into your field of vision, at the expense of the friends, communities and publishers you asked to see:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

What can we do about this? The answer lies in the founding ethic of the internet itself: the end-to-end principle.

Before the internet, telecommunications were controlled by centralized phone companies. If you wanted to reach someone else, you needed to connect to a centralized switching center, which decided whether to connect you, and if so, what to charge you.

The internet, by contrast, operates on the “end-to-end principle”: the job of the network is to transmit data from willing senders to willing receivers, as efficiently and reliably as possible. One expression of end-to-end is Network Neutrality, the idea that carriers shouldn’t be allowed to slow down the data you request unless the service you’re trying to use pays for “premium carriage.”

Social media has run the internet transitions in reverse. They started off as end-to-end, neutral platforms. You created an account, told them which data you wanted, and they put it in a feed for you. Then, as they enshittified, they turned into miniature Ma Bells. You don’t get the data you requested, you get the data that someone is willing to pay to show you.

This means that publishers — including news publisher — have to pay ever-larger shares of their revenues to reach the people who asked to hear from them, and those people see an ever smaller proportion of the things they asked to see in their feeds.

The solution to this is to enshrine “end-to-end” delivery for social media: to make social media platforms’ first duty to deliver data from willing senders to willing recipients, as efficiently and reliably as possible:

https://locusmag.com/2023/03/commentary-cory-doctorow-end-to-end/

As a policy, end-to-end has a lot going for it. First, it is easy to administer. If you want to find out if a company is reliably delivering posts from willing senders to willing receivers, you can easily verify it by creating accounts and performing experiments. Compare this to more complicated policies, like “platforms must not permit harassment on their services.” To administer that policy, you need to agree on a definition of harassment, agree on whether a specific user’s conduct rises to the level of harassment, then investigate whether the platform took reasonable steps to prevent it.

These fact-intensive questions are the enemy of effective enforcement. Bad actors can (and do) exploit definitional ambiguity to engage in conduct that *almost* rises to the level of harassment, and which is *experienced* as harassment, but which doesn’t qualify as harassment:

https://doctorow.medium.com/como-is-infosec-307f87004563

Then there’s the problem of figuring out whether platforms’ failures to block harassment are reasonable or negligent, a question that can literally take *years* to resolve, and then only by deposing the engineers who build and maintain the systems involved.

By contrast, detecting end-to-end violations is simple and clean, and has an easy remedy in the event that violations are detected: if a company doesn’t deliver the messages it is supposed to deliver, a regulator or court can order it to do so.

Another important advantage of end-to-end: it is a *cheap* policy to comply with. Complicated platform regulations can have the perverse effect of being so expensive to comply with that only the largest — and worst, and most harmful — platforms can afford to follow the rule. That means that smaller platforms — including nonprofits, co-ops, and small businesses — are snuffed out by compliance costs, trapping users and business customers in giant, abusive walled gardens, forever:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/platforms-decay-lets-put-users-first

Imposing an end-to-end requirement on platforms would kill the practice of holding news publishers’ audiences for ransom. What’s more, it’s a policy that would benefit both large and small publishers — unlike, say, a profit-sharing arrangement between Big Tech and the news, which delivers disproportionate benefits to the largest publishers, whose owners are typically either billionaire dilettantes or private equity looters. And, unlike profit-sharing arrangements, end-to-end continues to provide value for publishers even if the tech companies crash and burn, or get broken up by regulators. We want our news to be adversaries and watchdogs for Big Tech, not its partners, with a shared stake in Big Tech’s growth and profits.

Now that the EFF “Saving the News” series is done, we’re rounding up the whole thing into a PDF “white paper,” suitable for emailing to your friends, elected representatives, and fellow news junkies. That’ll be up in a day or two, and I’ll post here when it is. In the meantime, here are the five parts:

Saving the News From Big Tech https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech

To Save the News, We Must Shatter Ad-Tech https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-shatter-ad-tech

To Save the News, We Must Ban Surveillance Advertising https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-ban-surveillance-advertising

To Save the News, We Must Open Up App Store https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-must-open-app-stores

To Save the News, We Need an End-to-End Web https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-need-end-end-web

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/13/certified-organic-reach/#e2e

[Image ID: EFF's banner for the save news series; the word 'NEWS' appears in pixelated, gothic script in the style of a newspaper masthead. Beneath it in four entwined circles are logos for breaking up ad-tech, ending surveillance ads, opening app stores, and end-to-end delivery. All the icons except for 'end-to-end delivery' are greyed out.]

Image: EFF https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-need-end-end-web

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[machetesquirrel]

Every so often I remember that Disney+ has the foreign distribution rights to Doctor Who and a little part of me dies.

[shifterscribbles]

🙃

Doodle comic bc I'm upset

[ridenwithbiden]

ICYMI or forgot about the #RightWing owner of #CNN.

"The leading shareholder in Warner Brothers Discovery is John Malone, a multibillionaire cable magnate.

Malone describes himself as a “libertarian” although he travels in rightwing Republican circles. In 2005, he held 32% of the shares of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. He is on the board of directors of the Cato Institute. In 2017, he donated $250,000 to Trump’s inauguration.

Malone has said he wants CNN to be more like Fox News because, in his view, Fox News has “actual journalism”. Malone also wants the “news” portion of CNN to be “more centrist”.

*He's also the largest individual land owner in the country.*

IT WAS A SET UP

for trump

[arctic-hands]

Thirty minutes and 9 paragraphs into an excited list of alternatives to Spotify's monopoly re: music, videos, podcasts, audiobooks, for weenies like me who are nervous about pirating, and my app crashes.

Well now I'm on a laptop and I swear to god if this crashes too I'm calling it a conspiracy.

LEGAL ALTERNATIVES TO SPOTIFY:

Music: There are virtually limitless options here. Buy music directly from the musicians/band! If they don't sell mp3s directly from their site, they almost certainly have CDs for sale, so buy those and rip the mp3s to your computer (if your computer doesn't have a CD slot, you can buy an external one for fairly cheap). Go to a new/used music store, they still exist!, and buy albums there. Buy old albums from ebay! Go to goodwill or other thrift stores and browse there collection of cast-off music for cheap, you never know what you'll find. Hell, browse their cheap vinyl if you prefer their sound and get a vinyl-to-MP3 conversion device if you like. They even have conversion devices for cassette tapes, if you find a treasure that was only ever released on tape. Once upon a time I would have said Bandcamp for MP3 or even physical albums (I once upon a time got an AUTOGRAPHED TO MY NAME CD of Lauren Ruth Ward's Well Hell album), but they recently union busted and a lot of artists pulled their stuff from them. I don't really know anything about 7Digital's business practices, but they are another seller of MP3 music, as well as MP4, FLAC, and WAV.

Music DEVICES: If you just want to manage everything on one device, your phone, get the free VLC app! It's open source and is absolutely wonderful. I only ever used it for music, but it's capable of much more than I realized, and it's open source and ad-free! And the audio files are tiny, even when I was running out of room on my sixteen gig old phone, I still had a substantial music library on it before before I got a dedicated music player.

Which brings me to my next point: MP3 PLAYERS STILL EXIST! I own two! My first one is a twenty-dollar SanDisk Clip Jam (an established and sturdy brand), my current is a thirty-dollar Phinistec Z6 (that just came out of nowhere it seems). Each have their pros and cons, and there are so so so many options out there. Some are smart, some don't even have wifi (neither of mine do). Some have expandable card slots for even more music. Some are extremely basic, some have a plethora of features. Some are cheap but still decent in sound, some are high-end for that true audiophile experience. Some have touch screens, some have buttons, some have no screens at all. Some only use wired earphones, some only use bluetooth, some (like the Z6) can use both! There are so many brands out there even in Twenty Twenty-four. Even the random brands cropping up online are some really good shit, and I bought both of mine used bc I have concerns about the lithium industry. Oh, and some are regular battery powered. And you don't need iTunes or anything, I just use the basic Windows Media Player to rip my CDs or put mp3s music on my player. In fact I've been avoiding Apple players because I'm worried they'd brick older devices, especially ones with wifi. But there are so many options out there, it's impossible to name them all.

Audiobooks: YOU DON'T HAVE TO USE AUDIBLE! Libro.fm has a similar business model (an optional subscription fee with a free credit every month, or the option to buy book without a subscription for a little bit extra price), and you can direct the profits to the indie bookseller of your choice! I have mine set to go to Baltimore's anarcho-feminist bookstore, Red Emma's. How to listen to the audiobooks you buy? Libro has an app you can listen to directly from! AND they have the option to directly download from the site (meaning no program you have to install) the book in non-proprietary mp3/mp4 files so you can listen to it on any device that can use those files! THAT INCLUDES MP3 PLAYERS! Almost every music player on the market now not only plays audiobooks, but has sections on the device specifically for them! Some, like the Clip Jam, are even proprietary audible-compatible if you still use or already have books there (check audible's site, and you'll have to go thru a registration process). I was listening to audiobooks on both my CJ and the Z6 (the Z6 doesn't have a section for them, but still played them), but I recently bought an e-ink/e-paper (meaning no backlit LED screen causing eye strain or insomnia) ereader, a Pocketbook Touch HD 3, and that is mp3/mp4 capable for audiobooks, and is easier to maneuver books with since it's meant for books. ALSO: the library apps Hoopla and Libby also have audiobooks you can listen to via phone or computer/browser, depending on your library's catalog. Some ereaders can even have the apps for them, and if they have audiocapabilities you can use the ereader for that too.

Podcasts: There are so many apps for this. I have Podcast Addict (I don't remember off the top of my head if it's on apple, I use android, but there are still so many apps). Literally I only had to sacrifice one podcast when I stopped using spotify, PodcastAddict has everything else I've ever listened to or want to listen to in the future. You can download them for offline use on your phone, and, you guessed it, MOST MP3 PLAYERS HAVE PODCAST SECTIONS TOO. MINE DO! There are still ads at the beginning and end, but I usually skip over them without care.

Video: This one is a bit trickier as YouTube is also a monopoly, but what I do is just watch yt on my phone's Firefox browser with UBlock Origins adblocker installed. Sometimes yt gets into a hissy fit with adblocker, but UBlock usually gets ahead pretty quickly thus far. And if in the periods Origins is losing, I just find something else to do. I'm sure someone else has recommendations for videos, they're just not a big part of my life right now.

Anyway, don't let the horrid beast that is spotify monopoloize the audio industry OR your time! There are options, and even if you're not a luddite like me that hates having everything on my smartphone bc I'm worried about privacy or companies yoinking their stuff off my devices via wifi (like Amazon did once with their copies of, of all things, Nineteen Eighty-four about a decade ago) at the whim of corporations. You HAVE OPTIONS! YOU HAVE THE POWER TO CONTROL YOUR MEDIA AND REJECT MONOPOLIES!

[mckitterick]

Let the Platforms Burn

Tumblr is seeing massive growth thanks to the implosion of Twitter and Reddit. but migrating here or elsewhere means starting all over from the beginning, which is why users so seldom make the leap away from much-despised platforms (can you say "Facebook")

in his important new piece, Cory Doctorow argues that we need to fundamentally change the way social media and other user-content platforms operate, and give users the power to easily migrate their content and connections from site to site

he argues we need to let bad platforms burn (using the metaphor of healthy fires that clear out dangerous underbrush, preventing destructive wildfires) to make room for new, better ones without punishing users for escaping social-media prison

full piece (and podcast version) here: X

a few choice excerpts:

Today's tech giants run "walled gardens" that are actually walled prisons that entrap their billions of users by imposing high switching costs on them. How did that happen? How did tech become "five giant websites filled with screenshots from the other four?"

The answer lies in the fact that tech was born as antitrust was dying. Reagan hit the campaign trail the same year the Apple ][+ hit shelves. With every presidency since, tech has grown more powerful and antitrust has grown weaker (the Biden administration has halted this decay, but it must repair 40 years' worth of sabotage).

This allowed tech to "merge to monopoly." Google built a single successful product – a search engine – and then conquered the web by buying other peoples' companies, even as their own internal product development process produced a nearly unbroken string of flops. Apple buys 90 companies a year – Tim Cook brings home a new company more often than you bring home a bag of groceries.

When Facebook was threatened by an upstart called Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg sent a middle-of-the-night email to his CFO defending his plan to pay $1b for the then-tiny company, insisting that the only way to secure eternal dominance was to eliminate competitors – by buying them out, not by being better than them. As Zuckerberg says, "It is better to buy than compete"

it's great that we're seeing such a reinvigorment of Tumblr, but this site's delight could evaporate overnight with some bad updates (presaged in recent corporate messages). better than hoping Tumblr might stay good forever is ensuring we can leave without losing everything - and knowing we can leave would help prevent the enshittification of our beloved Hellsite

[thenotsolittlemisspeculiar]

Teleprompter

(Source)

[theboyatthebustop]

Okay, Patrick H Willems' "What's Next After Superhero Movies" (which is linked below) inspired me to make this because I want to know the people’s opinion on the possible replacements to the MCU mentioned in the video.

[lewisinho]

among the criticism i dish out at f1 journalism, what also needs to be pointed out is the general lack of nuance in the writing; with a contained bubble of journos who get to write the 'big pieces' and have the most access, the lack of diversity amongst them dilutes, or even entirely neglects, the multifaceted dimensions and important opinions that drivers (most particularly lewis) have to offer; these journos have their favourites and allegiances; it is no secret that partisanism exists in f1 media, but it is important to highlight just how severely this undermines the integrity of 'the messenger' that a journalist is supposed to be; the perspective of the same old white dude giving me a 'first-hand experience' of what lewis said to the written press, is not one i am particularly interested in reading; i was reminded of this in relation to lewis' recent interview and the article mark hughes wrote, in which he effectively questioned lewis' authenticity and honesty; that is not to say that it was not altogether a worthwile read (it was also helpful that there were other articles written by different journalists about the interview and i could gather other perspectives and to some extent confirm a journo's veracity via comparison), but i was generally disappointed with the standard; i know these journos, i know more or less with which drivers/teams they sympathise with, and i also know the limitations they have...i am not enthralled when one of them almost disdainfully undermines lewis' integrity, tries to spin a narrative or provide an opinion on a matter on which an old white man really shouldn't have much to say on; the f1 bubble is small, very small, when you compare it to a sport like football, you can see why it is so slow with change and modernisation; when it's all in the hands of a few people in the business who have been writing for the past few decades, no wonder it is just so hard to get new, young, diverse voices in; but through even the most recent examples, change is so desperately needed