Davos elites seem nostalgic for a time when “they were the gatekeepers and owned the facts”. Imagine being held to a higher journalistic standard!
Social media has both destroyed and freed society
Just destroyed from what I see.
Definitely only destroyed. While journalistic integrity has always been something fragile and often lacking, the shift of news media to try to capture the social media audience while simultaneously trying to “compete” with the content aggregators has led to much more vapid and misleading reporting.
24 hour cable news was the death knell for news media, and social media has been the final nail in the coffin. It accelerated the decline in journalistic standards to a ridiculous degree.
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Before social media, we used to converse in physical spaces and got more diverse ideas and attitudes. After social media, the algorithms (and ourselves) nudge us into ideological spaces where diversity suffers.
Any time I look at Facebook or X(formerly twitter), I see two sides of the same shit-smeared coin.
On Facebook, feels like a majority of the random comments I see are all scum of the earth, racist, sexist, fascist etc. Every post about a new marvel movie is filled with comments about how the movie is going to be ahit because of “forced diversity” and “wokeness” - any political post is all about how dems should die, or aoc needs to be murdered, etc. And it’s never just a few people, its dozens, with hundreds of likes and supporting comments.
On the other site, it’s mostly blue-haired “bleeding heart liberals” who are so liberal they’ve come full circle back to fascism. Trying to restrict people’s rights because they have some shitty ideas, or completely ruining people’s careers over a rumor.
Before social media, you would be forced into public places to have these conversations, and you’d be forced to interact and learn what people who don’t agree with you have to say and think, and that broadened your worldview. Now facebook and xitter just feed you into an algorithm and spit you out in a bubble with other people with the same ideas, because you’ll all agree and converse and engage more, because there’s positive reinforcement there, and from that point its a feedback loop slowly making you more liberal or conservative, when typically most people would fall pretty close to center, give or take some hot button issues like guns and babies.
To give them benefit of the doubt, maybe they meant that they were trusted to be factual. “We owned the news” could mean most people thought “I trust the WSJ so if they say so it must be true”. But now in the age of misinformation, no one can be trusted.
But all this was said at Davos, the literal comic con for billionaire assholes. Its more likely they were talking about a news monopoly, facts be damned.
Dammit! I wish there were a news owner who could tell me what to think! /s
I mean, they lost all credibility the second Rupert bought them. The willingness to sell cast doubt on their credibility prior to the sale.
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Good point! No one brags about control because they care about those they control. Its the power they value.
Yes, I gave her the benefit of the doubt as well, but framing it as “we were the gatekeepers” and seeming annoyed that they have to be more transparent about their process is an… interesting way of presenting the argument.
I didn’t find the full context for the video, but I don’t think she was talking about the problem of misinformation. Even if they have credible sources that 99% of experts agree on and a transparent process, misinformation will still be spread (see climate change denial). So I think that’s a different problem entirely.
For just a dollar a week, you too can support neglected billionaires unable to keep their stranglehold on the narrative
You mean pushing lies and propaganda for israel that were debunked in a few days made them lose credibilty? Crazy.
Only Rupert controls their narrative.
