Misinformation meets music & monetization
Media statistic of the week
According to a new FTC report, more than 95,000 people reported about $770 million in losses to fraud initiated on social media platforms in 2021. The FTC describes it as “a stunning eighteenfold increase over 2017 reported losses.” People 18 to 39 were more than twice as likely as older adults to report losing money to these scams in 2021.
The top fraud categories were investment scams, romance scams and online shopping scams. The dollar amounts were higher for investment and romance scams, but the largest number of reports involved online shopping. And “when people identified a specific social media platform in their reports of undelivered goods, nearly 9 out of 10 named Facebook or Instagram.”
This past week in the media industry
Spotify opts for warning labels
Anne Steele of The Wall Street Journal was first to report last week that Neil Young’s music was being taken down by Spotify after his ultimatum over Joe Rogan. As Marlon Weems tweeted, “Looks like that misinformation money is just too good to give up.” Speaking of money, J. Clara Chan of The Hollywood Reporter reports that Young is expected to lose 60 percent of his streaming revenue by pulling his catalog off of Spotify.
But Neil wasn’t alone, as other artists, including Peter Fampton, Barry Manilow and Joni Mitchell, soon followed his lead. And things royally heated up when Prince Harry and Meghan Markle expressed their “concerns” to Spotify over Covid-19 misinformation on the platform, via statement put out by a spokesperson for their foundation, Archewell. As CNN’s Max Foster, Vasco Cotovio and Rob Picheta report, the Sussexes announced an exclusive partnership with the service in December 2020.
Then came the statement from Spotify CEO Daniel Ek. On Sunday he published a blog post about Spotify’s Platform Rules and Approach to COVID-19.
Reading this, Ben Collins thinks, “This here’s a company that is panicking.” Lora Kolodny says, “I personally think Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and the medical community deserve a lot of credit for pushing Spotify to this point.”
But as Nilay Patel notes, “Spotify CEO @eldsjal publishes a blog post about the Rogan controversy, including a link to now-public content guidelines. The plan is to put warning labels on Covid content, which… I don’t think the medical community is going to feel very heard.”
Adds Chris Sutcliffe, “We recorded tomorrow’s @mediavoicespod yesterday morning, so before we could respond to this latest news from @Spotify. This might not even have made the final edit though. It’s just a sop, a half-measure that changes nothing.”
In the meantime, though, “I guess this is what happens when so many people delete their accounts and you lose money,” tweets Peter Planamente.
tHey’Re juSt coNversATioNs
Also worth a read, Michelle Manafy’s Twitter thread, “[misinformation meets music & monetization coverage, a thread].” In it, she links to Sam Byford’s story at The Verge, Joe Rogan defends podcast and apologizes to Spotify for backlash.
The short version, via Daniel Harvey: “tHey’Re juSt coNversATioNs.” Here, Nilay Patel observes, “‘I am usually unprepared’ is an incredible Adult Son defense.”
So yeah, as Martin Bryant says, this is “Joe Rogan here, demonstrating why a show of his popularity really does need a lot more preparation, especially for controversial guests.”
Empowering #misinformation
As conspiracy theorists get iced out of the big social networks, they’re relying more and more on podcasts and newsletters to get their messages out. The Washington Post’s Elizabeth Dwoskin wrote about the trend in her new piece, Conspiracy theorists, banned on major social networks, connect with audiences on newsletters and podcasts.
As Dwoskin reports, researchers from the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate say newsletter company Substack is making millions off anti-vaccine content, including at least $2.5 million a year in revenue from just five anti-vaccine leaders who have amassed tens of thousands of subscribers, each paying $50 a year. The Center for Countering Digital Hate’s CEO says it’s the kind of content that’s “so bad no one else will host it.”
“Substack, wasn’t it supposed to empower individual ‘creators’? Well, it has. #misinformation,” tweets Mark Seibel. “Sigh, but of course,” tweets Mark Neal.
For his Platformer newsletter, Casey Newton also wrote about how Spotify and Substack are tangling with anti-vaxxers. “When policies are unclear and unevenly enforced, trouble always follows,” he notes.
Super vague
For their part, Substack co-founders Hamish McKenzie, Chris Best and Jairaj Sethi argue that Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse.
Glenn Fleishman finds that to be a “Laughably bad attitude that is entirely about money and masquerades to be about encouraging points of view. Lies and harmful speech are not ‘a point of view.’”
And Louise Matsakis notices, “What Substack is and isn’t willing to do on moderation remains super vague. This post seems to imply that they won’t take down misleading posts about vaccines. But at the same time, its rules already ban promoting ‘harmful or illegal activities.’”
Meanwhile, “The comments on Substack’s blog about why they aren’t going to moderate against conspiracy theories and vaccine misinformation are full of conspiracy theories and vaccine misinformation,” tweets Elise Thomas. Go figure.
Science enters the chat
So what is the solution? In The scientific process, and how to handle misinformation, Mathew Ingram of Columbia Journalism Review writes about the Royal Society’s new report on the online information environment.
“Is removing misinformation -- especially when it’s about something dangerous, like a global pandemic -- the right way to handle the problem? The UK’s Royal Society says no,” Ingram tweets.
Instead, he writes, “‘mitigations to manage its impact,’ including demonetizing the content (by disabling ads, for instance) or reducing distribution by preventing misleading content from being recommended by algorithms,” could prove to be more effective.
They can’t say they don’t know
The Brookings Institution has published new research by Megan Brown, Zeve Sanderson and Maria Alejandra Silva Ortega of NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics and the International Women’s Media Foundation showing how gender-based online violence spikes after prominent media attacks.
They found that attacks by male media personalities can have serious implications, including becoming full-blown gendered disinformation campaigns that seek to silence the voices of female journalists by undermining their credibility.
Craig Newark highlights, “After Tucker Carlson mentioned NYT journalist Taylor Lorenz on air, harmful speech in her Twitter mentions rose 115% – and she’s not alone. The @IWMF and @CSMaP_NYU investigate ‘The Tucker Carlson Effect.’”
“What happens when Tucker Carlson and Glenn Greenwald target female journalists? A dramatic increase in threatening, toxic and sexually explicit online attacks. They can pretend they are not responsible, but they can’t say they don’t know,” says Don Moynihan.
Or they can just “Let women do their jobs,” tweets Terri Rupar.
Bad news for press freedom
The Committee to Protect Journalists posted an alert that Indian journalist Rana Ayyub has received an onslaught of online rape and death threats. The CPJ is calling on Indian authorities to immediately conduct a swift and thorough investigation into threats made to the Mumbai-based Washington Post columnist and freelance journalist.
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Oliver Darcy of CNN reports that anxiety and anger are gripping the press corps in Mexico after the recent spate of murders. The CPJ considers Mexico to be one of the most dangerous countries in the world to practice journalism, and “Journalists in Mexico are fed up,” he writes.
Last Tuesday, journalists and human rights advocates in cities across Mexico demonstrated in favor of press freedom. Oscar Lopez of The New York Times filed his story from Mexico City, Killing Spree Spurs Outrage Among Journalists in Mexico. He tweets, “In Mexico, the killings of journalists has become almost horrifyingly routine. But this month has felt especially brutal for many in the country.”
In Turkey, The Guardian reports that the country’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has promised that a well-known television journalist would not go “unpunished” after she was arrested for allegedly insulting him. Aakar Patel shares “what she tweeted ‘When the ox comes to the palace, he does not become a king. But the palace becomes a barn.’”
Helen Davidson of The Guardian reports from Taipei on a new report showing that foreign journalists in China are subject to rising intimidation, including trolling, physical assaults, hacking and visa denials, as well as what appears to be official encouragement of lawsuits or threats of legal action against journalists.
Next, Ilya Lozovsky urges, “Please take a moment to read our latest investigation from Central Asia. We looked into how the Kyrgyz government used absolutely appalling methods to go after an independent investigative journalist (and @OCCRP fellow).”
The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) goes Inside Kyrgyzstan’s Campaign to Silence Bolot Temirov. Tweets Matthew Kupfer, “The arrest of investigative journalist Bolot Temirov earlier this month was bad news for press freedom in #Kyrgyzstan. Here’s some worse news: The Kyrgyz security agency also surveilled, blackmailed, and slandered the @TemirovLive team for months. #Уят!”
Reporting from Budapest, Shaun Walker of The Guardian writes that a group of Hungarian journalists targeted with Pegasus spyware plan to take legal action against the Hungarian state and the Israeli company NSO, which manufactures the tool. He says the suit is “Unlikely to be successful, but still an interesting test case for the legal avenues available to people who have been potentially unlawfully surveilled.”
Chicken or egg?
Do countries with better-funded public media also have healthier democracies? Of course they do, as Joshua Benton writes at Nieman Lab. “But the direction of causality is tricky. Do a democracy’s flaws lead it to starve public media, or does starving public media lead to a democracy’s flaws?”
In that piece, he draws from a new paper by Timothy Neff and Victor Pickard published in The International Journal of Press/Politics, “Funding Democracy: Public Media and Democratic Health in 33 Countries.”
He explains, “In which I take a new paper by @Teejneff and @VWPickard and add — ketchup doodling — ‘a Tucker Carlson lens’ — obligatory Hallin’s spheres — the phrase ‘Auntie Peebs,’ which I think I may have just coined as a nickname for @PBS, at least based on Google?” He explains,
G/O Media-related deaths
Many journalists are sharing Tarpley Hitt’s story for Gawker, What Happened at The Root? The short answer seems to be, G/O Media. Christina Warren says, “This is really sad to see. Yet another G/O Media related death.” Adds Dave Levitan, “Man, G/O Media is just a plague.”
Daniel Lippman points out, “This anecdote about what happened at The Root is kinda wild,” while Josh Eidelson highlights, “Writers were also encouraged to put ‘ad-safe’ headlines on the homepage... The G/O spokesperson said this was done ‘company-wide’ across all their sites to help ‘provide a safe environment… for our marketers.’”
To be fair, though, “You have to give G/O Media bosses credit for being the most innovative in the biz when it comes to destroying beloved publications. No one else is operating on their level,” says Wesley Fenlon.
And while we’re at it, We need to talk about Deadspin, another G/O Media property. At Awful Announcing, Jay Rigdon writes about a pretty unbelievable editors’ note and the overall decline of the site.
As Awful Announcing tweeted, “.@jayrigdon5 looks at the most recent zombie Deadspin editorial misstep and wonders what’s more indicative of their decline- the embarrassing article in question or that it took several days for anyone to notice?”
On the plus side, Ian Casselberry says, “The awful Deadspin Mike McDaniel piece had the fringe benefit of compelling two excellent responses: @dannyoneil’s column at Barrett Sports Media. @jayrigdon's take for Awful Announcing.”
In that column for Barrett Sports Media, Don’t Make Assumptions to Fit Your Sports Opinions, Danny O’Neil highlights some of the other problems with that story (and others), as well as a few of the many things you shouldn’t make assumptions about.
Sometimes it backfires
Jeffrey Toobin just…tweeted it out: “Imminent Supreme Court retirement?” Soon enough, it was clear that the tweet wasn’t just speculation.
“NBC News correspondent Pete Williams brought the scoop to his network’s viewers at 11:54:14 a.m. on Wednesday,” as Erik Wemple of The Washington Post writes in a column that Ziva Branstetter praises for the “Great analysis here by @ErikWemple on how the opaque nature of the Supreme Court sometimes backfires on the justices.”
Wemple notes that, according to a later “sub-scoop” tweeted by Fox News’s Shannon Bream, Breyer was “upset” about how it all played out. Later still, Bream tweeted that sources clarified that he was not actually “upset,” just “surprised.”
Wemple is going with “upset.” And about that, he says, good.
“Media critic @ErikWemple on reports Stephen Breyer is upset @PeteWilliamsNBC scooped his moment: ‘Breyer sits on a court that won’t allow cameras in the courtroom. ...It’s only fitting, then, that a reporter scuttled his tidy retirement rollout,’” Dan Shelley quotes.
Words of wisdom
For his Second Rough Draft newsletter, former ProPublica president Richard J. Tofel shares Four Lessons from Two Decades of Newsroom Lawyering. Stephen Engelberg says, “@dicktofel is the best press lawyer I worked with in more than 40 years as a journalists. This is a must read for anyone who wants to limit their involvement with lawsuits to research material.”
Adds Tracy Weber, “The thing I loved most about @dicktofel was his visceral excitement in @propublica stories. You could literally feel him vibrating when a very, VERY good investigation was about to publish.”
At Slate, William Saletan has written a piece about What I learned in 25 years of writing for Slate. “For 25 years, @Slate gave me a home, wonderful colleagues, and the opportunity to think and grow. It’s a gift I can never adequately repay. This essay is about what I learned: Get out of your bubble, study your failures, and try to become wiser every day.”
Graham Vyse shares, “I met @saletan when I interned at Slate a dozen years ago. I remember he brought bell peppers to munch on at editorial meetings, which I thought admirable. I’ve admired his writing—and his liberal temperament—and look forward to his @BulwarkOnline work.”
A few good reads
Explain it to me like I’m a three-year-old. Please. From Kate Cray at The Atlantic, Context, Clarity, Care: How Kids’ Media Cracked the Code to Pandemic News. She shares, “I explored how children’s media has been covering the pandemic and the wonderful strangeness of kids’ news more broadly.”
Taylor Lorenz is joining The Washington Post as a columnist. She spoke with Charlotte Klein of Vanity Fair about the move and says she hopes The New York Times will “evolve in their ways” as she leaves for The Post. Lorenz also told Klein that she thinks The Post gets the internet in ways other outlets don’t.
An obit gets honest and goes viral. You probably already know what obit that headline’s referring to, and about her Q&A for Nieman Storyboard with Andy Corren, son of the “plus-sized Jewish redneck lady” who died in December, Lisa Grace Lednicer tweets, “When an interview just writes itself.”
You can read or listen to the next one (or both, if you want to be sure to catch every word). For her New York Times Sway podcast, Kara Swisher interviewed Bob Iger, and Disney’s Former C.E.O. Gave Me the Exit Interview I Asked for, she says.
She urges, “Don’t miss this saucy interview I did with the self-described ‘liberated’ retiree @RobertIger.” Josh Spiegel found “A number of fascinating tidbits in this transcript of a recent post-retirement interview (including Iger subtly implying that sticking to data like a certain new CEO wants to wouldn’t have led to one of Marvel’s biggest hits), but that one is....uh…”
A few more
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2yI’m increasingly pessimistic 😞
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