Digital Content

Eric Schmidt, Executive Chariman of Alphabet, says the company is working to ferret out Russian propaganda from Google News after facing criticism that Kremlin-owned media sites had been given plum placement on the search giant’s news and advertising platforms.  “We’re well aware of this one, and we’re working on detecting this kind of scenario you’re describing and deranking those kinds of sites,” Schmidt said, after being asked why the world’s largest search company continued to classify the Russian sites as news. Schmidt name-checked two state-owned enterprises.

If you have the uncomfortable sense someone is looking over your shoulder as you surf the Web, you're not being paranoid.

• While broadband network speeds have improved substantially over the last decade, the web’s performance has stagnated from the end user point of view. 
• The disconnect between broadband and web speeds suggests that the “virtuous circle” hypothesis created by the Federal Communication Commission to justify common carrier internet regulation is false.
• A system for capturing passive measurements and sharing them among internet service providers, web developers, and other responsible parties may be useful for accelerating the web experience.

AT&T’s former Mobility Chief Glenn Lurie says the wireless pure-play is on its way out. “I do think, long term, you’re going to see less single-play players and more double- and triple-play players, and more bundling. Because without question the customer expectation is going to change, and it is changing. Their expectation is around having everything on their device, having their video on the device, being able to do the things around social on the device. So, I just think that for carriers to continue to grow, they’re going to have to diversify.

The economic strains of technology on the entire media landscape are intensifying. Weeks after Google and Facebook announced record earnings, some of the biggest players in the digital media industry are still struggling to hit revenue projections, make profit or grow. Rapid consolidation in every sector, but especially digital, shows how difficult it is for media companies to survive in an attention economy dominated by tech platforms.

Google became the world’s go-to source of information by ranking billions of links from millions of sources. Now, for many queries, the company is presenting itself as the authority on truth by promoting a single search result as the answer. The promoted answers, called featured snippets, are outlined in boxes above other results and presented in larger type, often with images. Google’s voice assistant sometimes reads them aloud.

My country, Serbia, has become an unwilling laboratory for Facebook’s experiments on user behavior — and the independent, nonprofit investigative journalism organization where I am the editor in chief is one of the unfortunate lab rats. Facebook allowed us to bypass mainstream channels and bring our stories to hundreds of thousands of readers. But now, even as the social network claims to be cracking down on “fake news,” it is on the verge of ruining us. That’s why Mark Zuckerberg’s arbitrary experiments are so dangerous.

[Commentatry] We exist in a time when technological capabilities and economic incentives have combined to attack truth and weaken trust. It is not an act of pre-planned perdition. Unchecked, however, it will have the same effect. The broader question is how to deal with the exploitation of the Web as a vehicle for de-democratizing communities fueled by fact-free untruth? I would argue that it was software algorithms that put us in this situation, and it is software algorithms that can get us out of it.

We embarked on our research with a relatively simple yet ambitious research question: How are small-market newspapers responding to digital disruption? Key Findings:

Journalists working for Facebook say the social media site’s fact-checking tools have largely failed and that the company has exploited their labor for a public relations campaign. Several fact checkers who work for independent news organizations and partner with Facebook said that they feared their relationships with the technology corporation, some of which are paid, have created a conflict of interest, making it harder for the news outlets to scrutinize and criticize Facebook’s role in spreading misinformation.