Trust in your Newsfeed?

By Jim Jansen (Veerstichting presentation, Feb 2021)

To trust or not trust your newsfeed? That's the question.

This question raises three follow-up questions. One, how is your newsfeed created? Two, what do you use your newsfeed for? And three, how reliable does your newsfeed need to be?

I will give my perspective and will attempt to answer these three questions. For the past 15 years I have worked for American technology companies in Europe and the US. I will outline the forces that play a role on the internet and how we, as humans, process data. I will also give some examples of the dilemmas that large technology companies face when it comes to content publishing and online censorship. And I will tell you stories about my own journey. Finally, I'll provide some suggestions on who can act and on who should act.

Firstly, I want to talk about the medium which makes your newsfeed possible. One of the greatest business disruptors in modern history, the still young medium called the internet.

1- Positive facts about the internet.

At the beginning of this century, the commercial side of the internet was still in its infancy. The role that the internet was going to play was unclear, but the promise of its having global impact, its scale, really appealed to me. My generation which started working in the last years of the previous century can be seen as the 'baby boomers of the internet'. So I wanted to work for an internet company. I wanted to do cool sh*t that matters. I had read a book about Google and their mission which was 'to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful' really appealed to me. In my view Google was making the world a little better. Before, I had studied law and had gained some work experience at Unilever and as an entrepreneur. Why not me, right? And a few months later Google actually hired me. 

Fast forward two decades. What has the internet brought to humanity? Let me illustrate this using 5 data points for the US: I- the impact on the gross national product, II- the impact on the job market and III- on productivity, IV- the impact on healthcare, and finally, V- the impact on democratization. These are just a few data points, of the positive effects. To me these data points provide an answer to the question of whether the internet is living up to its promise. 

I- Impact on the gross national product (source: the Internet Association): The Internet sector accounts for $2.1 trillion of the gross national product of the US economy (in 2018), about 10 percent of the GNP. This makes the internet sector the fourth largest sector of the American economy, after real estate, government and manufacturing.

This study also found that between 2012 and 2018 the internet sector grew nine times faster than the economy of the country as a whole. Large and fast growing.

II-Impact on the job market: The internet sector is responsible for almost 6 million direct jobs, which is equal to 4 percent of the jobs in the US. The sector also indirectly supports an additional 13 million jobs (source: the Internet Association).

III- Impact on productivity: the combination of these previous two data points shows an interesting and very powerful characteristic of the internet: the high productivity (measured in gross national product per job). The internet sector is responsible for 4% of the jobs and those 4% generate 10% of the gross national product. 

IV- Impact on Healthcare: According to The World Economic Forum, the internet has a huge impact on healthcare. Some qualitative input from their annual studies: 1-The internet helps doctors connect to data sources, including each other. So that 2- The internet gives doctors a second opinion. And 3- The internet has cheaper sequencing technology and gives more access to a new set of data: our DNA. This data is used to make new or better medicines more quickly. In short, the internet provides more effectiveness and more efficiency in healthcare. Better, faster.

V- Impact on Democratization: The internet and the ability to connect and mobilize people, especially through social media, has a huge effect on democratization. Consider for example the role of the internet and social media during the Arab Spring. The internet as a whole or social media specifically are therefore also often the first things to be shut down by dictators, as recently seen in Myanmar.

These data points create a picture of the positive effects of the internet. The scale and potential for complete transparency in markets are unparalleled. Knowing that the medium is still relatively new, I believe that, the internet lives up to its promise. But at what cost?

2- To better understand whether you can trust your newsfeed, it is important to know which forces are at play on the internet. How is your newsfeed created? 

Human attention is one of the finite resources in the world. Michael Goldhaber, the internet prophet you've never heard of, introduced a new term to describe its scarcity. In the mid-1980s, he referred to the then still obscure term of psychologist Herbert Simon: the attention economy.

Today, one of the biggest online business models is the sales of advertising space on websites. The more consumers come to visit your site and the longer they stay, the more money you can make by selling ads. As the consumption of online media was increasing dramatically over the past two decades, human attention was becoming the currency. 

Twenty years ago, Google seemed to approach this opportunity differently. The goal was to get people off the search engine as quickly as possible. After all, that would mean that those people quickly would have found what they were looking for. In the battle for human attention, Google doesn't want you to stay on the search engine site for long. The site therefore only shows the search bar. That's the only thing you can do. Search. 

But while Google doesn't want you to stay on for long, they do want you to come back often. Scale has always been at the heart of Google's innovation philosophy, product development and acquisitions. The scale of the internet and the advantage you create as a first mover are so significant that the idea arose that the internet lends itself well as 'the winner takes all' opportunity. In addition, Google was too dependent on search alone and investors did not like that. It was therefore essential for Google to also enter other markets than just search. Actually to enter all markets. Now Google has 9 consumer products with more than 1 billion unique users per month. The strategy of going broad and entering all markets, and dominating, was both a defensive and an offensive move. The winner takes all. 

Scale creates data. Data creates insights. Insights create revenue. If the datasets are large enough, you can make very interesting and seemingly incoherent connections. For example, if you've entered this search query, read that article, went there on vacation, and so on, your next purchase will be brand X with 99.999% certainty. Artificial intelligence enables tech companies to predict your behavior, which they can easily take advantage of. They can target you very specifically with an advertisement to give you that last push to buy a product. The aim is to get the right message to the right person at the right time. 

Scale creates data. Data creates insights. Insights create revenue. The battle for human attention has thus become a battle for data!

There are three giants on this world stage. Facebook which has data about what you like, or your interests. Google which has data on what you are searching for, or your intentions. And Amazon which has data on what you actually bought, or your buying data. Because the internet has the potential of the winner takes all, this is a fight to the death between these giants. The term 'Walled Gardens' refers to this. This means, the logging in on your Google account in order to use all Google products in its environment. Google collects your data based on your behavior within its Walled Garden, but does not share that data with other companies like Facebook and Amazon. They have their own Walled Gardens. Time will tell who is going to win.

Back to human attention and the attention economy. How do you win human attention and how do you keep it?

According to Maslow, human needs can be divided into 5 phases: physiological needs, safety needs, needs for love and belonging, needs for prestige and needs for self-actualization. The tech industry responds in a very sophisticated way to these needs. In the Netflix documentary 'the Social Dilemma' several Silicon Valley executives comment on this. They talk about consciously creating software that holds your attention for longer or draws you back to your devices over and over again. Simple examples of this software are autoplay and notifications. With autoplay, based on your behavior the next video is automatically selected, and played for you after you have finished watching the video you were initially looking for. With notifications you will receive a signal when the next email or text reaches you. This may seem harmless, but artificial intelligence and machine learning have already proven to be able to predict and manipulate your behavior. We are just at the beginning. And what is already worrying is that even the main people responsible for the product development at these tech giants themselves do not know where this will end. They predict chaos and, yes, civil war. In January this year the US came close. We're losing control and the interests served are the interests of big money. Let's go back to Michael Goldhaber. He concluded the following about the attention economy: 'The fundamental thing about the attention economy is that you can not escape it'. So we are all part of it to a greater or lesser extent.

Forces come into play that respond to your needs. They hold and manipulate your attention. What is your attention drawn to? What exactly is that content? KellyAnne Conway, former adviser to President Trump introduced the term 'alternative facts' in a heated interview about how many people showed up at Trump's inauguration. The journalist who interviewed her responded with 'alternative facts are not facts, alternative facts are falsehoods'. Conway defended herself by arguing that we actually take facts for facts because we heard them from someone or something, not because we counted or measured everything ourselves. That is also true, but with the introduction of 'alternative facts' a step had been taken towards the social acceptance of telling falsehoods. Multiple independent sources or an independent authority are essential. More on that later.

The introduction and the acceptance of 'alternative facts' led to various studies. A study by MIT Sloan shows that false news on Twitter spreads many times further, faster, deeper, and wider than factual news. This applies to all researched information categories. Another study concluded that fake news spreads 6x further and faster on Twitter than factual news. Just think about that for a second. Fake news spreads 6x faster and further than factual news. What is causing that?

According to the MIT researchers, the answer lies in human psychology: people love novelties. We are curious. Fake news is a novelty and people are much more likely to share fake news than factual news. People get attention on social media. People are not only part of the supply for attention, they are also part of the demand for it. People gain attention by being the first to post something that was previously unknown. But that news doesn't have to be true. In fact, in most cases it isn't. A quote from the MIT researchers: 'people who share novel information are seen as being in the know'. So as a person you are rewarded if you spread something that is false. According to Maslow, this gives a 'sense of esteem, or self esteem, respect, recognition, status, strength and freedom'. Because many tweets about the news are often falsehoods, the MIT researchers advise, ‘think before you retweet’. In my view these researchers should know better.

This was about facts. Now on top of that comes the complication of interpretation. People have opinions. People see things differently. People see different things. 

You may know this drawing. 

Maybe you don’t. What exactly do you see? A younger woman? An old lady? Both? Or something completely different?

Interpretation is personal and not necessarily truthful. Or maybe by definition not truthful to begin with. The rules of good journalism require for any news story two independent, and independent verifiable, sources. One of the root causes of subjectivity is that posts or tweets do not follow the rules of good journalism. They are opinions.

Almost on a daily basis I am amazed by the various news channels in the US. They report about the same things, but because they often have strong political biases, they interpret these things differently. These channels that present themselves as news channels are actually opinion channels, which is something completely different. And what about the difference in interpretation between a religious person and a scientist? Now, this diversity is precisely something that makes humanity more pluriform and more interesting. We should cherish that. However, the existence of this diversity does make the interpretation of your newsfeed more complex.

Furthermore what people take to be true is affected by repetition. With an endless repetition of 'stop the steal' President Trump has led millions of Americans to believe that the elections contained wide spread voter fraud. However, in the 86 lawsuits that were filed on Trumps behalf after the election, no proof of his claim is provided. Zero. Napoléon already said that 'L'histoire est un ensemble de mensonges convenus'. History is a series of lies agreed upon.

Any discussion of power is now ultimately a conversation about attention and how we extract, use, waste, abuse, sell, lose, and profit from it. It is impossible to understand the rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA wing of the far right, or rather modern American politics, without understanding attention hijacking and using it to wield power. 

Back to tech companies and their dilemmas. Concerning content publishing and online censorship, the founders and CEO of Google faced a very dire challenge. If they wanted to enter the Chinese market, they had to submit to the censorship of the Chinese government. That meant that some search results were not allowed to be shown in China. Think about, for example, searches for the Dalai Lama. It didn't mean they were forced to tell falsehoods, but it meant they weren't allowed to tell certain truths. The dilemma was: do you prefer to tell part of the truth and thereby tap into a very large market, or do you prefer not to tell anything at all and not enter one of the biggest markets? The opinions differed widely between Larry, the founder, and Eric, the veteran CEO. A third option, namely being able to tell the whole truth, via a detour, Hong Kong, eventually turned out to be possible. 

Recently, in the heat of the US elections, Twitter banned Trump for the rest of his life. With 88 million followers, Trump had the sixth most followers on Twitter globally. Trump's tweets were daily news around the world and his account became a big business interest for Twitter. Slander and hate speech are no criminal offense in the US. Jack Dorsey, Twitter's CEO had long been under pressure to restrict Trump's tweets. Now, freedom of speech is a first amendment right in the US, and speech knows fewer limits there than in (most) EU legal systems. But when Trump incited violence, which is a crime in the US, the legal border was crossed and only one action could be taken.

The debates within the major tech platforms about online censorship and content moderation are ultimately debates about attention, in which of course, the boundaries of the law are ultimately leading.

All of the above gives an idea of the forces that play a role in how your newsfeed is created. It's not hard to imagine what this does to the reliability of your newsfeed. Thus the second and third questions become relevant: What do you use your newsfeed for? And how reliable should your newsfeed be? Only you can answer these. 

3- Responsibility and Moral Leadership.

Most of the online content is created by consumers. They use different rules than good journalism and are rewarded by the spread of misinformation.

Their posts are published on the apps of tech companies who bear great responsibility in turn. 'With great power comes great responsibility', as Uncle Ben said in Spiderman. Unfortunately, there is a lack of adequate screening by the tech companies of the content before it is posted. This is a financially led decision. Every minute more than 500 hours of video are uploaded on YouTube. What would it cost to check that pre-posting? Screening is done (mostly) post-posting. As a consumer, you can flag content as inappropriate, after which someone will assess whether this is actually the case. Then the post is either deleted or not. Big tech largely declares the position that they are not responsible for the content of posts which is a great contrast to, for instance, editors-in-chief of newspapers who do bear that responsibility. Of course, content cannot go beyond legal boundaries. Tech companies therefore create policies about what may not be published. Yet if these policies are too strict, they lose battles in the war of the attention economy. The result of all this is that certain risks have been accepted. For example, ISIS posts a decapitation video which can be seen by many consumers, perhaps children, before it is deleted. All this points to money being the driving factor. Interestingly enough big tech is not penalized in these cases while if a TV broadcaster shows something unauthorized, a fine will follow. It is time to better protect consumers online. It is time for regulation and time for moral leadership.

Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple recently took a very sharp stand against the data war. Quote: ‘If a business is built on misleading users, on data exploitation, on choices that are no choices at all, then it does not deserve our praise. It deserves reform. ... We should not look away from the bigger picture. In a moment of rampant disinformation and conspiracy theories juiced by algorithms, we can no longer turn a blind eye to a theory of technology that says all engagement is good engagement, the longer the better, and all with the goal of collecting as much data as possible. We need to be asking: What are the consequences? ... It is long past time to stop pretending that this approach doesn't come with a cost. A polarization of lost trust, and yes, of violence. A social dilemma cannot be allowed to become a social catastrophe. ... We believe that ethical technology is technology that works for you. It's technology that helps you sleep, not keeps you up. It tells you when you've had enough. It gives you space to create or draw or write or learn, not refresh just one more time. It is the time to ask yourself: Which philosophy do I want to pursue? Do I want a business that serves my customers? Or one that takes advantage of customers to serve my business?'

This is inspirational, moral leadership. Much needed, but I am afraid it is not enough. The financial interests are too big. Governments must intervene and start regulating more quickly.

The internet is one of the biggest business disruptors in modern history. The promise of scale, transparency, efficiency and connectivity, all have come true, but at a price. The internet remains a phenomenal gift to humanity, when used properly. But now there is work to be done by governments, by big tech and by you and me. I myself have left big tech to get involved in a different way. Diversity, regulation and moral leadership are essential. We must also remember that we do this for ourselves and for our children. You and I are part of the supply and the demand for attention, a market and ecosystem we can not escape from. Governments will ultimately not allow a few parties to become too dominant. This just takes a lot of time and in the meantime this war is raging at exponential speed. I will never let go of the initial opportunity to make the world a little better, doing cool things that matter. But I have now thrown myself with great enthusiasm into advising start-ups and scale-ups, coaching CEOs and making and keeping the internet safe. I am grateful for this journey and look to the future with enthusiasm and optimism.

To conclude: trust in your newsfeed depends on three things. 1. How is your newsfeed created? 2. What do you use your newsfeed for? And 3. How reliable should your newsfeed be? We have reviewed different ways in the attention economy in which our attention is generated, manipulated, valued and degraded. Attention sometimes may just be the lens, a bias, through which we can read the events of the moment. It can also force us to better understand how our minds work or how we value our time and that of others. 

Perhaps by being aware of the attention economy and of attention itself, you can begin to focus it on people, ideas, and goals that are worthy of this precious resource, your attention. In turn you can focus your attention with intention. In other words, take the advice of writer Howard Rheingold to heart: 'pay attention to what you pay attention'.

Thank you.

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