Study Hall Digest 10/22/2018

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

Is Facebook Responsible For Companies Laying Off Journalists?

I’m sure we’re all aware by now that Facebook seriously fucked up its measurement of video viewership on the platform during its big push for video in the past few years, but to recap: the company didn’t factor in views of less than three seconds in its metric for length of viewing, which severely inflated the reported watch times. This has been known since 2016. But advertisers are now alleging in a new lawsuit that Facebook knew about the miscalculation (to use a generous term) for more than a year before disclosing it (which Facebook denies).

Facebook overstated video view times by as much as 80 percent in some cases. Whether it’s lies or negligence, that’s BAD. The question of whether this misreported data directly informed staffing and editorial decisions within newsrooms quickly became the subject of a heated media world debate, but it seems pretty delusional to totally absolve Facebook of responsibility given what we know. Even though journalists took to Twitter to heap blame on Facebook, several digital publishers that axed writers to “pivot to video” told the Wall Street Journal their decisions were not attributable to Facebook’s dumbassery.

Rubina Madan Fillion, who focuses on social media and analytics as director of audience engagement at The Intercept and previously worked as a social media editor at the Wall Street Journal, told Study Hall that after reading the Journal report, she doubts the particular metrics cited in the lawsuit are solely responsible for publishers’ decisions, but does feel Facebook’s aggressively pro-video agenda has been influential.

“Even if those particular metrics weren’t the driving force in the layoffs, I do think the overarching theme of platforms pushing for more video did contribute,” Madan Fillion told Study Hall.

She pointed to a comprehensive Nieman Lab report showing a Facebook VP preached about the popularity of video over text as a means of consuming information. The piece also cites reports on data from Chartbeat and Parse.ly that directly contradicted this assessment — data Facebook and publishers apparently saw fit to ignore. “Video, video, video,” the VP rhapsodized at a Fortune conference in June 2016. Months earlier, Zuckerberg himself had predicted Facebook users would be sharing almost exclusively video content within five years.

“That push was really coming from Facebook rather than from user demand,” Madan Fillion told Study Hall, noting the New York Times in 2016 started churning out content for Facebook Live as part of an experiment that only lasted about a year, shutting down right after Facebook stopped paying for it.

“It really just goes to show how much power Silicon Valley has over hiring decisions at news publishers,” she said. “It’s pretty disturbing that the whims of maybe a few CEOs could make such drastic differences in terms of journalists’ livelihoods, and the news industry in general.”

Facebook contributed to the problem, but it was also a kind of collective hallucination that video would solve all the persistent problems of display advertising. It didn’t, lol!!! Let’s try not to repeat the same vicious cycle with Netflix.

How About We Stop Giving Platforms to Violent Bigots?

After the Metropolitan Republican Club hosted Vice co-founder Gavin McInnes as a speaker and his anti-masturbation-oath-taking Proud Boys beat up some counter-protestors, the New York Times thought: Someone should profile this guy! So they did, in a piece that calls McInnes a “provocateur” willing to “get physical” (no mention of the fact he has explicitly said the Proud Boys are willing to kill people). The piece also presents him as a kind of quirky alternative to other far-right leaders because he was a “Brooklyn hipster.”

I understand the impulse to write these pieces as a means of shedding light on how these increasingly influential assholes think. But when publications bend over backwards to appear neutral by letting said assholes explain themselves in their own words then mildly contradict them in the interest of fairness, it just allows them to spew their bile in a friendly forum. In the Times piece, for example, the writer wrote that McInnes has denied being a racist, but then cites some EXPLICITLY RACIST McInnes quotes about the superiority of white men, and then in the next paragraph notes, “critics say rhetoric like this echoes strands of white-nationalist philosophy.” What a gentle, mild, clinical phrasing about a sentiment that is blatantly white supremacist in nature!

Civil Token Sale Fails, But It’ll Be Back

This week in A Thing Everyone Saw Coming: Civil’s token sale failed to reach its minimum goal of $8 million, meaning everyone who bought tokens will get their money back (unless they really want Civil to keep it, as apparently some do). Founder Matthew Illes blames the failure mostly on the laborious token-buying process and pledged in a blog post to launch a simpler sale in a matter of weeks. “Civil is not going anywhere,” he writes in the post, which is decidedly upbeat despite the disappointment. Sure, a simpler process would help, but the bigger problem seems to be that cryptocurrency is an unproven factor for newsrooms, the project is wholly experimental, and there are serious doubts about its business model.

The Haunting of Hill House: When Metaphorical Ghosts are Literal Ghosts

I binge-watched all ten episodes of Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House this weekend and the most part, I loved it! It’s genuinely scary but also really emotionally affecting in its examination of the long-term effects of trauma and how the things that happen to us in childhood haunt us the rest of our lives, whether we fully realize it or not.

But there is something I hated about it that I now realize is due to my feeling thoroughly owned: the Crain sibling who is arguably the protagonist is a WRITER, and such he is interpreting the story for the viewer and is characteristically obnoxious about it. So basically, the ghosts are… ghosts, but they’re also symbols of each character’s particular trauma. This is pretty straightforward and difficult to miss as you watch the show! It doesn’t exactly beg interpretation from a narrator. But WE GET AN INTERPRETATION that feels a bit like breaking a fourth wall, like the protagonist is looking directly into the camera and explaining the storytelling devices instead of letting us experience them.

In a scripted monologue, the dude who has just seen LITERAL GHOSTS explains to his wife that ghosts are “memories” and “wishes” — hello, someone read some theory on narrative as identity!! This is unforgivably annoying, but… pretty true to form, seeing as the guy is a writer. I have gone through my entire life recklessly ascribing symbolic significance to shit way less interesting than ghosts so I could make sense of my experiences. Fortunately only my therapist suffers the consequences, not a large swathe of Netflix’s viewership.

Longread of the Week: All hail the rightful Queen of Sweden, a little girl who pulled a 1,500-year-old sword out of a lake! Honestly this is the best thing anyone has written all year: “Daddy was begging me to rush so he could watch the World Cup final, but I like to take my time about things so I ignored him.” I mean!! A true queen.

SHORT LINKS:

— Salon’s editorial staff has ratified its contract with the Writers Guild of America, East, securing some big wins including minimum salaries and mandatory raises.

— RIP Lenny Letter. The website founded by Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner has logged off for good. According to the New York Post, the site had struggled for ad support and had been hemorrhaging subscribers since last year. Despite its divisive co-founder, Lenny seems to have mostly been eulogized on Twitter fondly, with writers sharing the beloved personal stories they published there.

— Hate walls in offices? Also hate other humans? Allow me to recommend these human blinders, a device once exclusively for horses, so you can block out your co-workers without resorting to a traditional office design, aka walls!

— Most have reacted to the horrific murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi with horror because it’s horrific, but Tucker Carlson says we’re a bunch of suckers because he wasn’t even that famous! Nobody even knew his name a few weeks ago! So totally normal response to, again, a horrific murder.

— Sarah McNally of beloved bookstore Mcnally Jackson talked to NYmag’s Intelligencer about the shop’s forced move from its Prince Street location. Her landlord, who she calls a “dickhead,” apparently raised the rent from $360,000 to $850,000 — but it’s ok, she’s fine with moving because the building sucks!

— Jesse Singal apparently tweeted his outrage at the Trump administration’s planned anti-trans legislation — I couldn’t read the tweet myself, because he blocked me after I called him transphobic in this very newsletter, but I got the gist from the outpouring of responses. Several writers and activists have both called him on his bullshit and implored others to unfollow him on Twitter. Reminder that you don’t have to flat-out declare war on a class of people in order to undermine them: