Disclosure: I have been a technology reporter for the last 15 years, working for exclusively online publications. One of the topics I regularly cover is digital privacy and anonymity, including the various ways that websites and companies track their users.
This is a post about politics. It is not a post about Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, or why you should vote for any particular candidate. I want to talk about a different, larger problem.
Up until the invention of the Internet, it was difficult for a newspaper, magazine, or TV station to know how many people had consumed any given piece of content. Newspapers could track how many people bought the paper, and they knew if articles were featured on TV or radio spots, certainly. There was, however, no way to track exactly how many people read a single story or were so moved by certain coverage that they walked across the office to hand the paper to a friend.
Today, there is. Websites today track what stories you click on, how long you spend reading them, and whether or not you then share the story on social media. They know if you finish one story and click on another headline, or leave their site thereafter. They know if you come back to the story multiple times (probably to leave or read comments), and they often even know where you came from – for example, did you see the link on Twitter, or did you click on it on Facebook?
But all of this user tracking hasn’t helped online publications make money, and digital advertising rates are a fraction of what print media still earns. Today, a paper with 200,000 paper subscribers and twenty million monthly visitors to its digital edition may make more money from its paper than its website. But paper as a medium of distribution is dying, and digital revenue isn’t making up the gap. In 2003, print advertising revenue across the entire newspaper industry was $44.9 billion. In 2014, print advertising revenue was $16.4 billion. Meanwhile, 2014 digital ad revenue for all the major newspapers in America was just $3.5 billion – almost exactly what it was in 2006.
So, on the one hand, newspapers and online sites can now track exactly who their stories reach. On the other, total ad revenue has collapsed over the past few years. Most online advertising rates are based on how many page views you stack up on a daily basis, and the best way to spur people to share content is to give them a reason to do it. Repeated psychological studies have shown that people share things based on their emotional state, not the facts of the content. In other words, if something makes you feel particularly strongly, you’re more likely to share it. Multiple studies on the nature of content sharing have attempted to discern which emotions are most likely to drive sharing. What they’ve found thus far is that awe is the feeling most likely to drive viral content. But the second most-common driver of whether or not people share content? Anger.
I’ve seen this in my own work. Last week, I wrote two stories about Apple’s new MacBook Pro laptops. The first was a fairly neutral overview of the products, the second criticized some of the design decisions Apple had made. As of this writing, the second story has drawn 22x more traffic and 187x more shares than the first. One of my stories was shared on Reddit, one was not. One of my stories has been shared over 15,000 times, one was not.
Social networks like Facebook are not designed to be neutral arbiters of content. While much of how Facebook’s algorithms work is confidential, one thing we do know is that FB is designed to track what you share and what content you engage with, to better enable the site to show you similar content. Facebook presents itself as a neutral information company, but its entire goal is to encourage you to spend more time on Facebook, and it knows how much time you spend looking at each post. Facebook even monitors the things you don’t post. All of this feeds the creation of self-reinforced echo chambers, where people are continuously presented with evidence that confirms their own views, liberal or conservative.
I don’t want to paint a false image of this research as completely settled science. Social media networks are new, and research into how they foster an echo chamber around us is ongoing. But you should be aware that your emotional responses to material are being deliberately provoked as a way to drive revenue. This was always true, of course, but the plummeting earnings for most news companies have lent real urgency to the efforts. Viral content is king, and most stories are evaluated and framed with at least some regard to how likely they are to go viral. The difference, then, is in how much respect any given news outlet has for the idea that journalists should strive to present a true and factual accounting of events.
Unfortunately, the Internet has fed a vast explosion in news sites that have little-to-no regard for the truth. There are news organizations that are aware of viral trends and sharing statistics but still prioritize accurate, honest content – and for every one of those publications, there’s a hundred sites that don’t care. This account from Buzzfeed discusses how more than 100 Pro-Trump websites were launched from a single town in Macedonia, Greece. I said before that I didn’t intend to make this piece about Trump, Clinton, or the merits of voting for either, and I don’t. Pretend that this story is about Hillary Clinton, or Bernie Sanders, or any other political candidate. The point is still the same.
Young people in Greece realized that creating headlines and stories about Donald Trump was the best and easiest way to earn a living. From the story:
The young Macedonians who run these sites say they don’t care about Donald Trump. They are responding to straightforward economic incentives: As Facebook regularly reveals in earnings reports, a US Facebook user is worth about four times a user outside the US. The fraction-of-a-penny-per-click of US display advertising — a declining market for American publishers — goes a long way in Veles. Several teens and young men who run these sites told BuzzFeed News that they learned the best way to generate traffic is to get their politics stories to spread on Facebook — and the best way to generate shares on Facebook is to publish sensationalist and often false content that caters to Trump supporters.
“Yes, the info in the blogs is bad, false, and misleading but the rationale is that ‘if it gets the people to click on it and engage, then use it,’” said a university student in Veles who started a US politics site, and who agreed to speak on the condition that BuzzFeed News not use his name.
This tendency directly feeds the raging echo chamber. People see an incendiary story shared and discussed everywhere, and they tend to assume it’s true. This, in turn, creates an environment in which journalists who know the story isn’t true are accused of being biased if they attempt to push back against it. Charlie Sykes, the conservative radio host, recently published the following. Again, you can ignore the Trump reference — it’s not relevant to the point I’m making.
Click to enlarge.
The “noise” embedded in discussions online is exploding, while the signal is getting lost. The relentless barrage of lies is literally making it harder for anyone to tell what’s true and what isn’t. Fact checkers are being graded on whether what they say conforms to what people want to hear, not what’s objectively true — and while humans can’t be perfectly objective, there’s a difference between at least striving to report an issue truthfully and accurately, and printing whatever you think will boost your earnings this month.
This essay isn’t the final word on anything. The transformation of American media isn’t the only reason Americans have become more politically partisan. Revenue alone doesn’t explain why the Internet has a tendency to surface incorrect bullshit. But what I’ve tried to do here is take some big-picture, 10,000-foot overviews of some of the causes of these trends.
The websites posting incendiary headlines in all capitals are not your friends. They are not dedicated to bringing you the truth. Whether you identify as liberal or conservative doesn’t matter. These outlets are designed to stoke and harness your emotions, with the deliberate goal of goading you into sharing what they write. Ask yourself this: Would it change your opinion of the media you consume if you knew that said material was intentionally written in such a way as to really piss you off, to provoke you into losing your temper?
If it would, watch for it. Look for the publications that frame things in hyperpartisan ways, or huge capital letters. Watch for claims that X will DESTROY Y (for any value of X and Y). I’m not asking anyone to vote for someone they don’t support. But try, at least, to be aware of the ways you are being manipulated. It’s not an accident. It’s not incidental to the truth of any particular story. Your anger is, all too often, the entire point.