I read a funny story the other day from the trash media I read from Australia. I have spoken a little bit about some of it over the last few weeks, like censorship laws the other day, but I wanted to add a bit more tonight, to highlight how the mainstream media operates.

“Unfortunately, it comes down to money and X’s monetisation framework is literally set up to optimise emotional, low-quality content that people just can’t get enough of,” University of Technology Queensland digital media expert Timothy Graham said.

“People shouldn’t be financially rewarded for posting and sharing harmful content, including terrorism content on platforms like X,” Ms Rowland said.

Don't let the irony and hypocrisy escape you, because what they are saying is that while they don't think individuals should have free speech or share emotionally engaging content for money, it is fine for the mainstream media to do exactly that, and make tens of billions in the process.

"The shocking way X makes money" (taken from the headline into the story) is to do exactly what the news media is doing. Not only that, a lot of the news media leverages the content of X users to pad out their stories, whether those users are valid as a voice or not. This news site at least embeds all kinds of Tweets (or whatever the fuck they call them now) into their stories to make it appear that "the internet" is outraged, while the Tweet has all of 3 likes.

Mainstream media is incredibly dishonest.

And this is what happens when clicks matter more than truth, making the speed at which something gets put online more important than the accuracy of it. The entire news media is driven by exactly the same incentive that people are driven by on X, where clickbait headlines, low-quality content is the order of the day, every day, multiple times a day, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.

emotional, low-quality content that people just can’t get enough of

We have been led to believe that shorter content is better, because it is more efficient communication, but that is not true at all. All it does is transfer poor quality, shallow content, that doesn't cost much to create to an audience.

1+1=2

Congratulations, you now know math!

Journalism has been dead for a while, and I suspect that it largely killed itself, because it chose to compete on speed, not quality. While quality takes times, effort and research to build relationships and find out deeper information, competing on speed lowered the bar so that almost anyone can compete.

Including "influencers" on social media.

"Citizen journalists" don't actually have to be journalists, nor do they have to be ethical, impartial, objective or anything else, especially if they are following in the footsteps of the "professional" journalists who are also none of those things. Because they are chasing those lucrative clicks also, because that is what drives the ad revenue they need to get paid. They aren't in it for journalistic integrity, they are in it for a paycheck, and their masters pay those who generate the clicks - no matter what that content might be.

Instagram didn't make the Kardashians famous - mainstream media did.

If we want to have content where the truth is more important than the speed of release, we have to incentivize truth, or disincentivize lies. A web of trust for content that independently verifies content for validity is one way, which is an area that AI will help with more in the future, but it is also how we consume. The other aspect is to shift away from ad revenue being the only way to get paid on the internet, because once beholden to the ad dollar, the content and especially the truth, is going to suffer.

It is interesting though, as the governments of democracies around the world, and the globalized media conglomerates, are doing all they can at the moment to reign in free speech, saying that not letting us say what we want, and not allowing us to see what we want, is for our own good.

As dictated by them.

More authoritative control mechanisms.

Taraz
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