Do algorithmic media harm the principle of objectivity in the news?
In the traditional world of journalism, the material presented to the consumer was selected by human beings. Legacy media meant that editors would decide what stories to talk about and everything was in the hand of financial and political interests of stakeholders. Newspapers, TV and radio stations were actually working by taking their stories to favor a political party while at the same time consumers would decide what newspapers to buy and which TV and radio stations to watch. In the modern age of the internet, algorithmic media has played a big role in overtaking legacy media. Nowadays, instead of buying newspapers or switching on the TV or radio we can use the internet to find what we are looking for. This does not mean that editors have been removed from the process, take a look at https://news.google.com/or https://www.yahoo.com/shows. Gillespie stresses the fact that, even though automation is used, “patterns of inclusion” depend on human choices (Gillespie, 2014, p. 172). This means we have an actual control over the kind of information we want access to. We can now comment on stories and see our comments and this was almost impossible with legacy media.
The effect of the internet on objectivity is a an actual problem. Ward summarizes the traditional concept of objectivity as “a narrow form of epistemological objectivity that required a strictly neutral reporting of ‘just the facts’” (2011, p. 128). He stresses the importance of the epistemological aspect as it requires the journalist to follow “the best methods available at the time” in keeping with “standard practices” (2011, p. 129). This does not mean that the news should not include values but only that reporting or decisions should be made in good faith, and an attempt is made to present information constantly and fairly. The manipulation of information the opposite of epistemological objectivity actually causes a threat to democracy where it prevents consumers from making rational decisions.
The argument is that Facebook or any other social media, makes custom newsfeeds for its target audience then it is creating bubbles that isolate the audience from knowing other, this builds conflict with the principle that each of us has a right to choose what we wish to see or hear. To give an example: Let us assume that I am interested in a certain medicine; specifically, I want to know if magnets can cure cancer. I start searching on Google or social media using keywords “magnets” and “cancer” and this would allow me to get results about this certain medicine because the algorithms are designed to do just that (Fig. 1).However, if I actually followed the traditional way where there was no internet and go search in the library ,this would actually take a lot of time and would make me get endless results about things that might not concern this certain medicine at all.
There is, however, negative results for algorithms.The idea of getting suitable information that I have searched for will take me straight to the point and prevent me of knowing about the contradictory information that concern this issue. This has also helped those people who sell false news for political or other reasons. . “A socialbot is a software program that simulates human behavior in automated interactions on social network sites such as Facebook and Twitter” (Rouse, n.d.). In August 2018, the Guardian reported on the “spread of misinformation about vaccines on Twitter to sow division and distribute malicious content before and during the American presidential election” (Glenza, 2018). Using algorithms, the intention was to show that there is a kind of disagreement by giving the impression that many people agreed with one side or the other. I may be ignorant of the facts but I might feel encouraged for the idea that many people out there share my opinions.
Social media platforms using algorithms may or may not help in spreading of false news. Facebook has been accused of being a facilitator as it sold dataon 87 million users to Cambridge Analytica, which intended to use it to help the presidential campaigns of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. Facebook “not only supplied the raw material for Cambridge Analytica’s algorithms but was also the medium for its targeted messaging” (Halpern, 2019). This ofcourse has caused Facebook negatively: In May, 2018, Facebook published its first “enforcement numbers” (Fig. 2) where it claimed it had taken down 837 million pieces of spam and 583 million fake accounts in the first three months of the year (Rosen, 2018).
The difference between the way we obtain information in the age of the internet and the way we obtained it before is that nowadays we do not have to make a great effort to find what we are looking for. Social media has helped us a lot in connecting socially . Algorithms are the best tools that help us find whatever we are searching for in a short period of time.But algorithms cannot give us what is actually in our mind, they only give us results of what we have chosen to know about so its our responsibility to check the information we receive.Basically, we are the ones responsible for our ignorance if we choose to ignore important information.
References
Gillespie, T. (2014). The Relevance of Algorithms. Retrieved from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Gillespie_2014_The-Relevance-of-Algorithms.pdf
Glenza, J. (2018, August 23). Russian trolls “spreading discord” over vaccine safety online. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/aug/23/russian-trolls-spread-vaccine-misinformation-on-twitter
Halpern, S. (2019, February 22). Why the U.K. Condemned Facebook for Fuelling Fake News. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/why-the-uk-condemned-facebook-for-fuelling-fake-news
Rosen, G. (2018). Facebook Publishes Enforcement Numbers for the First Time. Facebook Newsroom. Retrieved from https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/05/enforcement-numbers/
Rouse, M. (n.d.). What is socialbot? WhatIs.com. Retrieved February 23, 2019, from https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/socialbot
Ward, S. (2011). Ethics and the Media. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511977800
