News websites are starting to realize they should have worked to own the conversation

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I’ve made no secret that I think individuals and organizations should work hard to own their content. This includes not only the primary content (like the actual story or post), but also the comments and interactions to the extent possible.

The second part of that is difficult, as social media is the default for most folks for conversation, but news organizations worked hard to accelerate that and now many are wishing they hadn’t. As a user, I really wish they hadn’t either. If I want to see more info about a particular story, it’s much easier to just scroll down and see the comments versus going off to social media to try to find all of the scattered commentary.

For example, I was surprised that I hadn’t gotten a system update on my new Pixel 6 yet, and Android Police had a story about that. The real benefit for me, though, were the dozens of comments on that same page where users shared what they tried, what worked, and what didn’t. It was fantastic.

Karl Bode at Techdirt recently wrote a great article that digs into this, and I thought I’d share a few of his thoughts. First is the idea that having comments on your site gives you a chance to more directly engage with users:

So is it better to at least keep one forum where the outlet has control and the potential to monetize commenters into subscribers? And how do we make that forum as good as it can possibly be?

The bigger issue is what Facebook has become, and how news outlets helped accelerate that growth:

The untapped irony is that many of these same major outlets that outsourced all discourse to Facebook over the last five to ten years, now complain incessantly about how Facebook has too much power over discourse, ad markets, and everything else. It’s pretty rare you’ll see anybody acknowledge that the decision to muzzle local communities and outsource all discourse to Facebook helped create at least some of the problems they’re now complaining about.

In some ways, this is pretty simple (though not easy) to fix. If you have a popular news site, you can turn comments back on and then take the time to build that community. It’ll take some work, but it’ll help drive more revenue back to news organizations and away from Facebook, which I think most people would agree is a good thing.

Check out Karl’s full article for more.

The Streisand Effect, slapping teachers, and critical race theory

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Back in 2003, photographer Kenneth Adelman was taking photos of the California coastline from a helicopter to document coastal erosion. He had taken approximately 12,000 photos of the coast, including one that had Barbra Streisand’s home in it. She wasn’t happy about it and sued Adelman to remove the photo — and she lost.

Prior to the suit, the photo of her home had been viewed six times (including a few times by her lawyers). Since then, it’s been viewed millions of times, and her attempt to suppress it was the cause of the popularity of the photo she was trying to hide.

Techdirt helped dub this kind of situation “The Streisand Effect”, and there have been hundreds of other examples since then.

Slapping teachers

I was reminded of this when listening to a recent episode of the Reply All podcast, where they dug into the awful TikTok “Devious Lick” trend, where students would steal items from their school (generally things like soap dispensers, but it sometimes got worse).

As “Devious Lick” settled down, a new list of “upcoming TikTok challenges” started making its way around the internet, with one of the most popular coming from the Officer Gomez Facebook page:

This was shared all over Facebook, mostly between parents and administrators, and on the local news. However, it was never really a thing on TikTok, and most kids were unaware of it. The parents and administrators were helping to make the list famous, and at best helped inspire a few incidents rather than prevent them.

Critical Race Theory

It seems to be a similar story with Critical Race Theory. It’s been around for decades, generally used in graduate-level courses, but has become a hot topic over the past year. The specifics of CRT aside, it’s mostly been a circular push by conservatives to “stop” it, but they’re really the only ones talking about (thus creating more buzz that needs to be stopped).

CNN has a good article about the history of CRT, which is a good read to get you up to speed on it if you’re uninformed (as I have been on it). I simply find it interesting that it’s mostly a hyped-up issue, because spurred on by the very people that are trying to fight against it.

Streisand continues…

In the years since The Streisand Effect was first coined, Techdirt has cataloged hundreds of similar issues where people or companies try to bury something, and the act of burying it only makes things worse. This is the good and the bad of the internet; I often push to help keep things open and uncontrolled online, but it also makes it nearly impossible to stop things like this. That’s generally good, but it’s not something you can fix if you handle your business in the wrong way.

Thankfully the teacher slapping and the CRT discussions aren’t likely to cause any major issues, but they’re good examples of where fighting against a non-existent enemy can make things worse.

The difficulty of trying to moderate content is hard to comprehend

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Moderating content on social media is incredibly difficult. People love to complain about it, and it’s indeed imperfect, but it’s a tough system. I shared the story of Chole before, but I recently came across a great article from Techdirt that gives some amazing statistics.

In a recent a talk from Evelyn Douek, a Lecturer on Law & Doctoral Candidate at Harvard Law School, she helped shape the scale of what social media companies are up against. During the course of her 30 minute talk:

  • Facebook would take down 615,417 pieces of content
  • YouTube would take down 271,440 videos, channels, and comments
  • TikTok would take down 18,870 videos
  • The Facebook Oversight Board would receive 48 petitions to review a takedown decision.

Those numbers are big enough, but you need to remember two more things:

  1. Those are just for a 30 minute chunk. We’re talking about 29 million pieces of content that Facebook removes every day.
  2. This doesn’t get into the amount of content that is reviewed and allowed to stay. Moderators and algorithms undoubtedly review and allow at least that much more content.

The answer?

That said, I still don’t have a good answer. The simple thought (and often cried on Facebook) is to just “stop moderating”, but that certainly wouldn’t work. As I shared with the story of Chloe before, moderators on social platforms have to remove some truly awful content, and we’re thankful that they do. As I’ve asked before, do you see much porn on Facebook? There’s a good reason for that, and just allowing all content to stay public isn’t a good answer. Even sites like Parler, which try their best to limit moderation, are struggling mightily with it.

Algorithms will improve and things may get better at some point, but for now I urge to you show some grace to those that try to keep sites clean, and own your content if you want to speak freely without worrying about false positive flags on your content.

For more, I encourage you to watch Evelyn’s presentation, which can be seen here:

Retweeting the click of the day

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I’ve posted many times on here why I believe most people should blog every day. Writing daily is forcing me to read more, it improves my thinking, and I feel that it takes the benefits of journaling and expands them.

Much of my inspiration for daily blogging comes from Seth Godin, and he has another great quote that explains why he does it:

Everyone should write a blog, every day, even if no one reads it. There’s countless reasons why it’s a good idea and I can’t think of one reason it’s a bad idea. Not spouting an opinion or retweeting the click of the day. Instead, outlining what you believe and explaining why.

The part that really stuck out to me was “retweeting the click of the day”. While I don’t see much of that on Twitter, I see quite a lot on Facebook — people simply share things that fit their viewpoint, without any consideration for truth or accuracy. That’s their right, as they often just see things like politics as a hobby, but we can be better.

I certainly retweet/share items I come across that I find interesting, but most of those interesting items turn into blog posts instead. Not only does that give me a chance to verify them a bit more, but I can also dig deeper into my own thoughts about them (“do I really believe that?”) and then move some of those to long-term storage to continue to shape my views.

If you want to just reshare stuff that fits your filter, go for it, but taking some time to explain and unpack will make your opinion much more valued and trusted.

Your attention is the product

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It’s long been said that “if you’re not paying for a service, then you’re the product” when it comes to things like Facebook or Twitter. While that’s essentially true, it’s not really you that is the product — it’s your attention.

In an increasingly chaotic world, your attention is likely your post important resource. If you give too much in one place, you have less to give to others. As I’ve said before, unwelcome attention-grabbing is why we all hate robocalls.

Facebook continues to cost $0 to use, which means your attention is what you’re selling every time you log on. That’s not necessarily an unfair trade, but just remember that you’re making the trade next time you visit.

One email subscriber = 1,000 Facebook followers

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While I have my share of bad things to say about social media on here, I’m still fairly active on most networks and plan to be for the foreseeable future. I suspect some of you found this post via social media, and that’s great!

In the long run, though, email is where your followers need to be. Not that email is great, per se, but you can truly own your list and that is hugely valuable. David Perell calls this taking your users over the Public to Private bridge.

Rand Fishkin recently laid this out in a very compelling (and somewhat depressing) post about the state of the web, and what creators need to be doing. In that post, he included the thought:

I’d rather have 1 new email subscriber than 1,000 more followers on Facebook

It’s amazing to me that email is again becoming one of the best ways to reach people, but the numbers don’t lie. Continue to use social media to the extent you desire, but do your best to continue to grow your list.

If you’re reading this through my email list, thanks! If not, I certainly welcome you to join me here.

Politics as a hobby

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A few weeks back, I shared about a friend of mine that posts constantly about politics on Facebook, with the majority of his posts attacking others, and a good number of his posts being completely false information. While I don’t mind his point of view and can respect all viewpoints, I find his (and a handful of others) consistent volume of posts difficult to understand.

A recent episode of the “Hidden Brain” podcast tackled this idea, and gave me more insight as to why someone might post political stuff all day long. They call it “political hobbyism” and compare it to people that constantly post about their favorite sports team.

In both cases, their actions online almost never translate into real change. For example, you’ll have people post online about how “I could have easily made that field goal”, when we all know that’s not true. Katie Nolan made a fun video about that a few years ago, calling out some of those folks:

By seeing those political folks online as being similar to that, it’s helped me to understand why they post that stuff all of the time — it’s just a hobby to them, like sports is to others. That doesn’t excuse posting outright lies to support your “side”, but gave me more insight into why people might post political stuff all day.

If you have time, that Hidden Brain episode (“Passion Isn’t Enough“) is well worth your time to listen to.

The good side of hate speech

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Free speech is a wonderful thing. While there are frequent arguments about what constitutes “free speech”, almost everyone can agree that it’s great to have.

Of course, free speech means people can say things you disagree with, even to an extreme degree. Sometimes, though, even that can be a good thing.

An episode of the How Stuff Works podcast covered this (“How Free Speech Works“) and they laid out a pretty simple formula for why hate speech can help move society forward.

  • If you suppress speech, you’re still not suppressing thoughts.
  • If you allow the hate speech, it can be refuted loudly and publicly.
  • In recent years, much of this has come out regarding sexual orientation and racial conversations.

Jonathan Rauch dug a little deeper in an article for The Atlantic titled “The Case for Hate Speech“. He said, in part:

Gay people have been coming out for years, but that has been a gradual process, while recent changes in public attitude have been dizzyingly fast. Something else, I believe, was decisive: we won in the realm of ideas. And our antagonists—people who spouted speech we believed was deeply offensive, from Anita Bryant to Jerry Falwell to, yes, Orson Scott Card—helped us win.

Our great blessing was to live in a society that understands where knowledge comes from: not from political authority or personal revelation, but from a public process of open-ended debate and discussion, in which every day millions of people venture and test billions of hypotheses. All but a few of those theories are found wanting, but some survive and flourish over time, and those comprise our knowledge.

To be clear, I’m not defending the words of people that speak this vile garbage, but I will defend their right to say it. The cool thing is that while I’ll defend their right to say it, it can also be used for good. It’s similar to seeing “friends” of mine that just post inciteful muck all day long; they have every right to do so, and I have every right to adjust my view of them accordingly.

The sharing of different viewpoints is what leads to increased knowledge and change, and sometimes it takes a bit of hate speech to help get that conversation going.

Animosity drives engagement

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It’s sad but it’s true, and most of you have seen it on social media. The more animosity behind a post, the more engagement it gets. Specifically, if you directly attack an opposing political group, your post is much more likely to be shared.

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From a recent tweet by Jay Van Bavel:

“Slamming a political out-group member increased the odds of a social media post being shared by 67%!”

There are probably a variety of factors at play here, including social media algorithms, but it really comes down to psychology. If you see someone attack a group that you also dislike, you’ll react strongly to that post and you’re much more likely to share it.

It got me thinking about a seemingly angry friend of mine on Facebook. You probably have some similar “friends” on there too. He’s a very nice guy in person, but over the last few months he’s become more and more divisive online. I thought I’d take a look and really see if that’s what he’s doing, or if it’s just what happens to pop up in my feed. Of his last 50 Facebook posts:

  • 25 were direct attacks on the the government, Democrats, or just “idiots” in general.
  • 12 more were specific attacks on Joe Biden and his policies.
  • 4 were positive posts about his family and community.
  • The remaining 9 were neutral stories and “did you know?” kinds of things.

You can do the math here — nearly 75% of everything he posts would qualify as “slamming a political out-group member”, and his followers eat it up.

Engage for Good

You can choose to be divisive to help raise your social media presence and do other things to raise metrics in meaningless ways, or you can choose to be a force for good.

For almost all of you reading this, it’s literally a choice you have. If you want to spout hatred all day and be miserable, that is absolutely within your rights — and it’ll probably get you more traction online, too!

Or, you can choose to take a different path. It’s up to you.

Why can’t we just “shut down” child porn?

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Child pornography and human trafficking are major problems across the world, and the web helps to facilitate both to a rather large degree. Whenever some website gets taken down (or blocked on a site like Facebook), you’ll often see memes like this start to float around:

At first glance, it seems like a solid question. Why can’t they? There are a few reasons.

Do you see much porn on Facebook?

The first revolves around who “they” are. When “big tech” shuts something down, it’s usually just that company removing specific content from their servers, like when Twitter kicked Donald Trump off their platform.

In these cases, child porn already isn’t a problem. Content moderation on social media is a huge ugly problem to solve, and those companies work hard to keep things clean and tend to do a pretty good job of it. I suspect you’ve not seen any child porn on Facebook or Twitter, probably ever. They keep their networks pretty clean (arguably to a fault at times, but it’s a tough job).

Bad stuff goes underground

The problem with stopping major problems such as a child porn is that it’s not published in a place that’s controlled by big tech. This stuff is often on servers in foreign countries where the local authorities really don’t care. If some guy has a server full of that trash operating out of Tolyatti, Russia, how do you stop him from here? It’s not easy.

Going a step further, much of this stuff is moving to the dark web where it’s almost impossible to track. Every site on the dark web is accessed by bouncing around to a bunch of different servers between you and them, making both identities nearly impossible to determine.

There’s no good solution

When people understand that, the cry is then to “nerd harder”! Certainly Google or Facebook could do something about this, right? Not really. Again, if a dude sets up a nasty server in a foreign country, Google and Facebook can easily block that content on their platforms, but it’s still out there on the web for others to access.

The solution to fix that is a nationwide firewall, similar to what China has, where the government controls what you’re able to see. Even with the best of intentions behind it, that would be a very slippery slope with awful consequences.

I’m sorry to say, but I don’t have anything resembling an answer to this problem. Just know that big tech indeed works very hard to “shut down child porn” on their platforms, but have little control to stop it everywhere else.