Digest 9/21/2020

Why publishers don’t cut ties with Facebook; the blatant consumerism of Cameo; Ringer union testimonials

THE FACEBOOK PROBLEM

Another day, another Facebook scandal! In a leaked memo obtained by BuzzFeed News, a whistleblower revealed that the platform (and the whistleblower personally) failed to take action on fake accounts acting to influence political matters and election results in countries including Honduras, Brazil, and the Ukraine. This included fake accounts reacting to and boosting politicians, or these accounts using fake assets to harass political opposition — in each instance, Facebook was slow to react, even after being alerted. It’s also clear that the junior employee who leaked the memo, who now says they “have blood on [their] hands,” had a questionable amount of power as a moderator in these situations.

Within the US, of course, disinformation abounds on Facebook, and what the media can do to counter it remains an unanswered question. On September 16, celebrities — including Kim Kardashian West — staged a 24-hour boycott of Facebook and Instagram to protest the company’s failure to deal swiftly with misinformation and hate speech. (Facebook had also been implicated in the fatal Kenosha shooting, which took place after a local militant Facebook group posted a call to arms.) The same week, the New York Times launched a pre-election feature called “Daily Distortions,” committed to debunking misinformation that goes viral on social media; one early post tackled a viral rumor circulating on Facebook that Molotov cocktails started the California wildfires. (I suppose it remains to be seen how successful these dispatches are at combatting disinformation, and they may be likely to have published for posterity either way, but can a New York Times analysis really put a lid on Facebook conspiracy theorists?)

Even as publishers debunk the misinformation spreading on Facebook, they show no signs of abandoning the platform. On the day of the celebrity boycott, the New York Times announced a deal with Facebook to develop augmented reality filters on Instagram that will accompany Times reporting. Major news organizations like the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, and BuzzFeed News have partnered with Facebook on its News tab, a feature aggregating news and sharing revenue with publishers. Facebook has made efforts to further rehab its image as the Grim Reaper of the news business by giving grants to local news organizations.

“What I find interesting is almost no newspaper [participated in Facebook boycotts],” said independent media analyst Thomas Baekdal, who publishes his own newsletter and offers consulting services to media clients. “There were a few that stopped using Facebook for a month, but most newspapers just went, ‘Let’s report about this then put the link on Facebook.’” 

On average, about 25% of referral traffic comes to publishers from Facebook, according to a Parse.ly analysis. For a big paper, Baekdal noted, that adds up to millions of views. Then there’s Facebook News, which is dedicated exclusively to news content through partnerships with publishers (it also displays content from far-right news sources like Brietbart). Whatever havoc Facebook may spell for the industry and for the information ecosystem as a whole, there is an obvious upside to these partnerships: they bring more traffic and more money to media companies.

If any publication were to truly break off from Facebook — pulling ads, pulling partnerships — it would be one like the Times, said Baekdal, which has seen subscriptions skyrocket even as ad revenue plummeted due to the pandemic. “The most important trend we’ve seen in the past five years in subscriptions — by far the most important trend and most important change in focus,” said Baekdal. “At the New York Times, it’s suddenly a major driver in everything that they do. The problem is, there are still a lot of publishers that haven’t figured it out yet.” Many outlets, including smaller, local newspapers, haven’t figured out how to successfully shift their traffic away from other channels and toward subscriptions, and thus are dependent on Facebook for referrals.

“I don’t see people moving out of Facebook in the publishing world,” said Baekdal. “They’re too focused on getting traffic.”

In New Zealand, one company is giving it a try. New Zealand’s largest media company, Stuff, is ceasing all activity on Facebook on a trial basis, in response to concerns around fake news and hate speech on the platform. Stuff editor-in-chief Patrick Crewdson said that it was a matter of principle, describing public trust as “a really essential value for us.” He also said the trial will help determine exactly how much traffic is derived from Facebook, which was difficult to pin down previously.

It seems unlikely that Stuff will set a trend in motion. It makes strategic sense to partner with the biggest social media platform in the world rather than spurn it, and like Baekdal said, most smaller publications likely can’t afford to spurn it — that is, unless they successfully transition to a subscriber-based model in which they are less reliant on traffic from outside sources. Or maybe, in a few years, every news organization’s star reporter will have broken off and launched their own subscription newsletter. “I don’t think what we see right now [with newsletters] is what the future is, but I see this change where…we’re seeing journalists re-defining why journalism exists,” said Baekdal. He pointed to Daniel Thompson, the journalist who quit his job at The Kenosha News over the paper’s misleading coverage of a Jacob Blake rally and launched a GoFundMe campaign to strike out on his own. This is a subset of subscriber-based media, but it’s also persona-based, maybe signaling a shift from trust in institutions to trust in individuals. 

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LONGREAD OF THE WEEK Naomi Fry at The New Yorker took a fascinating look at Cameo, an app through which you can pay a (usually minor) celebrity to record personalized messages, which has flourished during the pandemic. While Instagram offered a faux sense of intimacy with a celebrity who is really hawking their brand, Cameo puts the monetization front and center: “Cameo strips away the illusion: celebrity content is always a product. This realization is depressing, but there is also something unburdening about it. On Cameo, performers can be straightforward about the fact that they are exchanging their attention for money, and this frees them from the faux-authenticity of the Instagram influencer; users don’t have to worry that there is some subtle corporate sponsorship buried in the selfies. The transactional nature is out in the open, and videos swerve between overt, unapologetic shilling and surprisingly earnest sentiment.”

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EVERYTHING ELSE

— The Miami Herald was apparently publishing advertising inserts from Spanish-language publication LIBRE that nobody at the Herald bothered to read. Turns out those inserts were racist and anti-Semitic! The Herald has pulled the inserts and is launching an investigation into the partnership.

— The Ringer union, ahead of its next bargaining session, published some testimonials from staffers about how management has prevented them from supplementing their income while also withholding annual salary increases and reasonable baseline salaries. 

— Amazon, because it will not be sated until it dominates every cultural space imaginable, has added podcasting to the mix! 70,000 titles are now available through Amazon Music, and the company will be launching some exclusive shows hosted by DJ Khaled, Will Smith, Becky G, and Dan Patrick. 

— BuzzFeed staffers are concerned after a mass email from someone outside the company accusing their colleague of harassment was mysteriously deleted from all company inboxes, raising questions about the company’s access to staff email accounts and the safety of reporters’ sensitive information.

— “I wonder when we will collectively admit that the dominant short fiction forms of the 2020s are r/AITA posts and online advice column letters,” tweeted writer Emily Gould, something I had not considered before but immediately knew to be true.