26. 4. 2021
Standing up for Media - open letter
Média, zejména pak tisk, se ocitají pod stále větším ekonomickým i jiným tlakem, který ohrožuje jejich budoucnost. Přitom hrají klíčovou roli v pravdivém informování občanů a v boji proti dezinformacím. Jako příklad prvního můžeme jmenovat trvalé a systematické bezplatné využívání vydavatelského obsahu digitálními platformami, jako je Google nebo Facebook. Řešením nejsou ani programy, jako je v ČR právě spuštěný Google News Showcase (GNS), jehož prostřednictvím podle našich odhadů získávají vydavatelé jen zlomek hodnoty svých článků, které jsou do tohoto výběru zpráv zahrnuty. GNS je tak spíš snahou nějak dopředu reagovat na legislativní situaci, jež se pro digitální platformy nevyvíjí příznivě. K situaci médií se vyjádřila ve svém článku členka představenstva Světové asociace novin a vydavatelů zpravodajství WAN-IFRA, členka správní rady Unie vydavatelů a předsedkyně představenstva vydavatelského domu Czech News Center Libuše Šmuclerová.
Unie vydavatelů se obrátila na mezinárodní vydavatelské asociace, aby otevřenou výzvu podpořili všichni vydavatelé působící v zemích EU.
Zde najdete text výzvy v anglickém jazyce. Česká verze výzvy je dostupná zde.
Standing up for Media
To whom our society may concern
Libuše Šmuclerová; Member of the Supervisory Board WAN-IFRA; Member of the Board, Czech Publishers Association; Chair of the Board of Directors, Czech News Center
From the very beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, the media has been accused among other of: creating a false image of the situation and fueling the negative mood in our society. Some even called it an infodemic and considered it seemingly worse than the pandemic itself. The word “media” has been used to paint all with the same brush, the criticism is aimed at everyone, and the guilt is collective. But what is actually happening in the world of media? The fact that social networks and worldwide search engines have come into play is common knowledge. However, the way in which this fact has changed the entire system of distribution and consumption of news is less well known. One might think that the fake news is the unique source of problems. Unfortunately, not even close. Let’s take a deeper look. This text doesn’t just tell the story of the Czech Republic, but the universal experience of almost every publisher out there. It is about technologies, human nature, mutations of capitalism, lawmakers who have missed the train and it all boils down to one idea: we should protect the traditional media rather than criticize it!
The Goliaths of the modern era
The size of social networks and Google alone is breathtaking. The Internet has about 4.4 billion users worldwide today. Facebook represents approximately 72% of the share of all social networks across the globe, with about 2.7 billion monthly active users, and is also the owner of Instagram, which stands for about 1.1 billion users, as well as WhatsApp and Messenger. The world’s largest search engine, Google, manages approximately 92 % of the world’s search engines, and is used by about 4 billion people. Its sister company, YouTube, (both owned by Alphabet), has 2.3 billion users which is why we refer to Google and Facebook as the Duopoly.
In Czechia, the sizes of Facebook and Google are optically blurred. Official national measurements outline the parameters of the media market, but Facebook and Google are not subject to it. Which creates the optical illusion that they do not exist, especially for people outside the media industry.
Today, there are almost 8.5 million Internet users in the Czech Republic, of which 5.7 million and 3.2 million use Facebook and Instagram, respectively. Google holds an 84% share among search engines in the Czech Republic (only 11% is attributed to Seznam, once the largest in Czechia). YouTube is used by approximately 5.6 million Czechs. In total, 92% of Internet users in the Czech Republic also use social media, spending an average of 159 minutes per day scrolling, according to data provided by the AMI Digital Index.
The boom in digital technologies has been accompanied by a boom in online media. The number of data sources has increased several times over; nowadays, it is quite easy to set up an internet project at negligible costs. However, this is accompanied by an overall decline in quality (a lot of projects aim at “clickbait” advertising rather than journalism) and the homogenization of news. News spreads (like wildfire through websites but even more so through mobile devices who’s unified formatting provides no distinction between sources for the reader. At present, approximately 70 % of users consume web contents through their mobile phones. As similar pictures and headlines pop up on one’s screen while scrolling, it is difficult for users to distinguish which websites are the work of a large team of professional editors and which are dubious commercial projects. The whole world lies within one’s grasp, and there are countless news reports. The origin of the news and the messenger have become less clear.
That is why it is so important which pieces of news are provided as primary news in web feeds, and by what principle of selection and hierarchy the internet gatekeepers – the main dispatchers of news distribution – drive them into the bloodstream of the Internet. The decision on what we will or will not see is in their hands.
Surveillance capitalism and data mining
In the original environment of the Internet (in the era of “ask for forgiveness not for permission“), every single network device had to be identified and recorded. In fact, this created a giant monitoring device. And consequently, the discovery that, with the combination of smartphones the permanent spy in your pocket, and the fact that users leave behind themselves a huge number of traces of their behavior, now just called data, was nothing less than a goldmine.
Accumulated big data on numerous aspects of the human existence became input for algorithms to derive behavioral patterns, for predictions on what should be offered to people and what they might be most interested in. What reports should be prioritized for each individual, quite simply, how the offer should be targeted and personalized, and, most importantly, how to collect fat wodges of cash from advertisers for our focused attention. This was the beginning of the Data Age, (sometimes referred to as “Surveillance capitalism”, in which profit is made by analyzing the data through the continuous monitoring of users. Thereby, the “human trafficking” of modern times began.
In 2013, Facebook announced the launch of a new era of data analyzing. Using deep-learning methods, it wanted to reveal users’ unspoken emotions and anticipate their wishes. It already knew a lot: most couples break up just before spring break and two weeks before Christmas; the language people use in feeds may indicate emerging mental disorders in users (see the 2018 study), etc. Google understood that due to a false feeling of anonymity, people reveal far more about themselves by the words they searched than they would ever be willing to frankly tell anyone (see also the book Everybody Lies).
The Duopoly began to “bathe” in its knowledge of users, becoming a leader in behavioral targeting. Between 2001 and 2004, when Google began offering targeted advertising, its revenues increased by 3,000 %. As a result, 60 % of the profit from all of today’s global online advertising goes to the Duopoly. Just for comparison, only 1% of the growth in digital advertising revenues went to publishers in 2019. Google’s turnover amounted to USD 161 billion in 2019 and even USD 181 billion in 2020, of which advertising revenues accounted for USD 149 billion. The 2019 operating profit was a whopping USD 89 billion. By the way, Google pays almost no income tax in the Czech Republic, the money flows through its headquarters in Ireland. In 2019, Google paid CZK 9.610 million in the Czech Republic, in 2018 it paid only CZK 8.798 million. For comparison, Seznam.cz, the Czech internet leader with 8.4 million monthly real users in 2020, pays over CZK 200 million per year in income tax.
This staggering profit allows both Google and Facebook to grow further, innovate, and buy up promising start-ups, often those that might compete with them in the future. There is no problem in dropping crumbs of sponsorship pittances on the way to the goal, to bind the right places with gratitude. Initiatives to “support” journalism are nothing but covers, a PR alibi for those unfamiliar with this world. According to Brand Finance’s Rating, Google is today the world’s third most valuable brand, with Facebook in seventh place. Data on all of us is what is behind them, appropriated like natural resources, without our knowledge and with no legal restrictions.
The Naked Ape and online amplifiers
However, our behavioral patterns, perfectly read by the artificial intelligence, have also revealed a number of weaknesses in us, Homo sapiens. With our emotions, we are facing sharp mathematical hits from artificial intelligence. The Naked Ape, a bestseller, though first published in 1967, suggests by its provocative title the animal nature in humans, and is also an apt symbol for humans stripped of information, revealing human vulnerability.
A business model based solely on advertising (i.e. without paying users) requires, like a bottomless pit, users’ full attention – maximum time and engagement. Unless a platform has an appropriate legal or editorial corrective, it can make use of almost any tools to support user attention. Dynamic interactions between human nature and toxic production models are the main cause of the problematic impact on society.
For hundreds of thousands of years, the oldest parts of our brain have been trained to ensure survival by acting quickly (as with reptiles and mammals). Reason is secondary here (see Thinking, fast and slow by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman). The majority, more precisely, 95 % of human decisions are subconscious, made outside the grey matter of the brain, that we are so proud of. The code we have primarily been trained to follow has been emotions. Fear is the strongest emotion. News, threatening, shocking, eccentric and so on – which is what disinformation usually looks like – plays first fiddle in evolution, with online consumption that has become ever faster, playing into its hands.
Just like newsboys in recent centuries knew what piece of news they should shout in the street to earn a penny, social media algorithms know much more precisely what news will arouse interest in users. Disinformation, trolling, lies, hate speech, extremism...these are precise triggers that know how to catch one’s attention based on evolution. Any such piece of news contaminates any environment, no matter how intellectual it originally was.
We suffer from megalomania if we believe we are beyond the reach of biological laws. That personalization means only the consumption of high-quality news or news within our scope of interest. What a mistake! Where performance and clicks on ads is the highest goal, each algorithm quickly discovers that emotional, surprising, and dangerous news meets with greater response due to evolution. It immediately begins to amplify it, being aware of a certain intervention. It prioritizes such news, offers it more frequently, tests who else takes the bait. And the click counter is spinning.
Users themselves take care of the same with such news that is “evolutionary important”. By sharing it, they become the best newsboys, both on social media and through chain emails. A 2018 study by MIT, published in Science, stated that fake news spreads on Twitter six times faster than true news. Fake news is 70% more likely to be retweeted. Disinformation proliferates like in The Magic Porridge Pot Story.
What’s more, the original news, no matter how high-quality, is distorted when passed on and on. People hide behind anonymous nicknames in posts and discussions, with this “no name” shield releasing even more the brakes on passion and extreme statements. In the high-speed online environment, people often read only the headlines, without knowing the content of the article, producing disinformation themselves by reconfiguring, re-contextualizing: by making misleading claims in comments, misinterpreting the information, etc. According to a Reuters Institute’s survey published at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, disinformation made up 59 % of it. It is often spread by VIPs (politicians, artists, celebrities). Despite being the authors of only 20 % of those distorted statements, they stood for 70% of the engagement generated, as they are social authorities.
The dopamine loop and other “sugars”
Setting algorithms and influencing social media through them will one day be a chapter in the school textbooks on social psychology, sociology, and behavioral economics. Or perhaps one of the first chapters in which artificial intelligence will massively outdo humans, controlling them according to its needs. This doesn’t necessarily mean it comes primarily from bad intentions, but one needs to raise awareness and issue a warning. For the time being, the algorithm is just playing a game with us to get as many clicks as possible and to capture our attention. Making a profit is the Shem inserted into this algorithm golem. This golem can observe live what awakens our interest, going to meet us halfway through devilishly dynamic interactions.
Homo sapiens can also be lured by behavioral tricks, or “nudges”. Richard Thaler, a 2019 Nobel laureate describes exactly how and what nudges (see his book Nudge) are able to direct people’s actions. Technologies and online testing bring them to perfection.
Psychological tricks to activate dopamine, the “happiness hormone”, are a great tool to ensure users’ attention. The Facebook Like button is a typical example: it serves as a sugar producing pleasure, as a drug, a trigger of addiction. And then there is the clickbait – fascinating headlines that leave out the key information, and you simply have to click on them. And so on...
In September 2020, Netflix aired a semi-documentary The Social Dilemma which clearly details the manipulative techniques Google and Facebook use, and the tools they have developed to incite addictive consumption. It includes interviews with Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google, Justin Rosenstein, the co-inventor of the Facebook Like button, Tim Kendall, the former President of Pinterest, and many others. Alongside specific experiences, they also outline the personal dilemmas they faced after having realized the system in which they were involved and why they had to get off the train.
To understand how Google and Facebook work, it is worth watching the video of Tristan Harris at the January 2020 U.S. Senate hearing describing the platforms’ tricks in creating the illusion of free choice, an addiction to rewards, fear of missing out, desire for recognition from others, constantly distracting our attention, etc.
For the sake of completeness, traditional publishers have also begun to personalize and recommend in order to remain competitive in the digital environment. Many homepages in the Czech Republic also display different contents to different users. However, the difference from the Duopoly is immense, both in the principles employed and the nature of the profession, with the traditional publishers aiming to provide the best possible information, bear social responsibility and respect media laws with their news selection.
A publisher is legally responsible for every sentence it publishes. In allowing anything outrageous to be published, not only will the author of the article face legal action, but so too the publisher. This is where the principal difference lies. Although both publishers and technology platforms share the same essential feature – both disseminate mass-reaching information into the public domain, tech companies such as Facebook and Twitter claim it is only the author who is obliged to assume legal responsibility, while they are not. After all, they’re mere platforms! They unscrupulously grab freedom without responsibility. They pursue their own goals with algorithms set by the market and their own rules (ie. the “unplugging” of D. Trump’s Twitter account).
Setting the minds of society
With big data and information, the business of technology platforms not only has an economic dimension but also a significant social dimension. They have become a global, society-wide gamble with the minds of both individual users and entire social systems.
The development was gradual. Without the trace of a blush, Facebook did not hesitate to test via 700 000 web feeds what would happen were it to provide its users, like laboratory mice, with filtered positive or negative information. In 2014, this emotional manipulation study was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, proving the possibility of emotional contagion through social networks. After a wave of criticism, Facebook apologized, claiming the experiment was aimed at improving the service.
In 2013, Michal Kosinsky published a research (with a warning) on how Facebook can be used to identify a number of highly sensitive, unspoken pieces of information (sexual orientation, ethnic origin, religious and political beliefs, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, substance use, parental separation, etc.) This was a model derived from the “Big Five Personality Traits” (OCEAN) – a personality traits map to describe character. Thanks to this model, Facebook is able to gather from a rather small amount of likes as much information as our colleagues, close friends, our parents and our spouse, have....Ouch! Facebook collects several billion such likes every day!
However, this was the model that served as the basis for Cambridge Analytica. Using this model, it took part in the campaign on Brexit and the 2016 United States election. Sales, but also leaks of massive data sets, have been described many times. Actually, see the recent Business Insider’s article stating that the personal data of 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries, including 1.3 million Czechs, was leaked online in 2019. Obviously, this poses cybersecurity threats and the risk of hacking. And obviously, data and behavioral maps of population, models of what information should be communicated to whom, when and how can be used as a political weapon.
Disinformation, provocative news and distorted news can have both purely economic goals (a hollow clickbait production carrying advertising is sufficient business for many small internet projects) and political goals. Recently, there has been more and more talk about an information war between states; about the professional spread of disinformation, with the main goal being that of destabilizing and weakening the opponent. In January 2021, Semantic Visions, a news website monitoring company, published a finding that more than 90% of all Covid-19 misinformation in the Czech Republic originated from 30 websites that show pro-Russian tendencies on a long-term basis. Of these 30 websites, two sites make up 40%. Literally a few days ago, The Guardian published the article about Facebook's abuse of political manipulation and public influence. He talks about 30 cases in 25 countries.
Another interesting study, carried out by the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, shows who benefits from anti-vax moods.
And one more thing about setting minds in society. Today, please note this change, Google no longer offers responses to searched words in the form of simple lists of simple links, but in the form of an increasingly complex and personalized homepage on a specific topic, with a summary, offering videos, statistics, photos (mostly from publishing sources). You don’t have to click through to get to the source, as you can see everything you require at a glance. That’s just one thing. For another – every journalism student knows that the selection itself is communication. As is the hierarchy, and the order. Provably, the first search result gets clicked the most. Half of the results are never opened (see here).
Last but not least, what is interesting is where people get news. This is also an area in which we live in an altered reality. Today, about 75 % of the news reports people consume is taken from the digital environment. About 49% comes directly from social networks. See Reuters Institute’s 2020 Digital News Report . This means that 75 % of information is taken from a domain in which artificial intelligence is involved to a certain extent and where speed and superficial consumption give rise to simplifications, cognitive shortcuts, distortions and reconfiguration.
This also means that 49% of the information people view – news from social media – is fully amplified; specifically, this is extreme news of doubtful value that is often deliberate disinformation. For young people, social media serves as an even more important source of news (there’s nothing surprising about this). Please bear in mind that 92% of Internet users in the Czech Republic consume social media, spending thereon an average of 159 minutes a day.
The illusion of freedom
The technological and digital progress has pushed the human race forward by light years. Having gotten rid of geopolitical constraints, it has made knowledge available, it has been developing creativity, and understanding of the diversity of the world. It has democratized information, accelerated innovation, etc. And it’s something to be appreciated. Only some parts of it have broken away, dislocated from the historically proven healthy system. This is not only the greatest centralization of power in human history, where literally a few private hands can turn algorithms in any direction over the global public space, these are the complex consequences of their business, similar to those regarding the protection of the environment. This too is ecology: ecology of the media and social environment.
People usually have no idea what they are participating in or simply live their learned helplessness. The GDPR does not protect them, as it is not the ID number that is being played for. Google’s announcement that it will stop supporting third-party cookies looks praiseworthy, like protection of users’ privacy. However, in reality, by restricting third-party cookies, Google will further strengthen its competitive advantage in targeted advertising. It has an inexhaustible supply of its own data and data from the other companies owned by Alphabet, from Chrome, and the Android operating system (which are also leading companies in their respective areas!).
The 2015 cookie law has not solved anything. Most readers consider having to click on the mandatory pop-up banner a nuisance. The experiment in which people confirmed by clicking the death of their own child as they never read the text of the terms and conditions, is well known. This binary agreement – accept or leave – is a pitfall and a paradox of today’s freedom. Everyone values freedom. And yet all of us – like a declared non-freedom of choice, unlock the contents by clicking yes as fast as possible, giving our consent without really knowing what we are consenting to and turning a blind eye to the fact we are being deprived of our valued privacy. Faustus’ signature through a click.
At the European level, very important legislative acts in the digital sector are being prepared: the Digital Services Act, DSA, and the Digital Market Act, DMA. These are a set of rules and regulatory instruments that should amend the previous directives and regulations and will be binding on EU Member States, and hopefully regulate the gatekeepers. They should include rules to combat illegal content, rules to prevent gatekeepers from abusing their position, rules to protect users' privacy in connection with personalized advertising and also to ensure the transfer of data from one platform to another (so-called interoperability). If everything goes smoothly, which is not expected, the new regulations could come into force within two years.
The texts of these bills were published in late 2020. Plenty of things can come into play before the legislative process is completed: the interpretation flexibility, the definition of who is and who is not a quantitative and qualitative gatekeeper platform, how specific the measures on the whole range of the issue will be, who the regulator will be and whether it will be at a central or national level, what powers it will have and how its decisions will be enforced, according to what rules contents will be assessed, etc.
In the present months, the Czech Republic should also finalize the amendment to the Copyright Law (transposition of Directive (EU) 2019/790 on copyright and related rights in the Digital Single Market). Google hates it so much that it has invented a new product Google News Showcase to be able to claim that it has already concluded an agreement with publishers. In fact, this law stipulates at the European level that publishers are entitled to financial compensation for contents produced by them, which platforms are currently using free of charge. This is only to put right the present deviated state, as it is immoral to steal someone else’s property.
Protection of traditional media
Let’s sum up: Anyone who wants to judge the role of the media in the Covid-19 era must know that Google and Facebook have the same impact in the Czech Republic as the big Czech TV stations. Czechs spend 159 minutes a day on social media, consuming almost half of their information from there. What news this will be, is controlled by commercial algorithms that automatically, by definition of the system, amplify only some news, especially that which is emotionally expressive. Moreover, this news has not necessarily been created as a product by teams of professional editors, but as clickbait trade or even as a tool of deliberate destabilization. All of this is happening beyond the experience of society, beyond the media rules and laws, de facto invisibly, by immense corporate powers, slickly espousing freedom of speech. Which is, in fact, the speech of commercial interests.
The result is what we are living in: an epistemic crisis, an absolute relativization of any information, transfer, melding of bonds of faith, rules, and values. To quote the philosopher Zygmunt Bauman: the liquid reality of everything. And what about Covid-19? According to a STEM survey carried out in March 2021, almost 40% of Czechs believe the conspiracy theories around Coronavirus, with 10 % of Czech being inclined to believe that vaccination is intended to control people through the use of microchips.
The traditional media will also have to do their part, of course. They will have to understand that they must not let their brand, a beacon of orientation, professionality and substance in an over-informed society, be ruined. They will have to find their way to the young generation that is excellent at getting all their information in three clicks. They must be able to offer them information advantages, stand out thanks to other, distinctive levels of services, to help improve media literacy. And, first and foremost, to further improve their own contents.
It’s the traditional media that need protection. Not because they are a preferred scapegoat of politicians and sometimes also consumers, but because the traditional media must be able to protect what they are meant to do. They should provide a comprehensive view of society, giving it feedback that ensures the ability to solve problems, strengthen civic pride, reveal the potential of positive changes, and promote understanding. In short, secure the key social and democratic benefits, including the protection of the values of a democratic society and its principle of ethics and morality. If this is not the case, we are very likely to lose them.
It is no coincidence that the Royal Swedish Academy has recently published a report on social media, as a basis for the upcoming Nobel Prize Summit to be held in late April. The Academy is concerned about the impact of the spread of disinformation on social networks. “Social media reports have created a toxic environment where it’s now very difficult to distinguish facts from fiction”, said Owen Gaggney, the co-author of the report. “One of the biggest challenges now facing humanity is our inability to tell facts from fiction. This is undermining democracies, which in turn is limiting our ability to make long-term decisions needed to save the planet.”
Libuše Šmuclerová
Member of the Supervisory Board WAN-IFRA; Member of the Board, Czech Publishers Association; Chair of the Board of Directors, Czech News Center