Our New Media Resolutions for 2018

A look back at 2017, and a look forward to a fact-based future

As we start another year, we at Media Sifter decided to take a look back at 2017. In addition to making a few wishes for journalism in 2018, we are going to elaborate on some of the main events in the past year, and how we are going to keep working on bringing truth back to news.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, ‘post-truth’ was chosen as the word of the year of 2016. In the UK, the Brexit–supporting press spreading negative stories about the EU, combined with harsh political campaigning based on false information arguably had an impact on the referendum. On the other side of the Atlantic, it was claimed that fake news spread on social media, contributed towards the historical presidential election result in November 2016.

In 2017, most media consumers became familiar with the term ‘fake news’, but it has remained unclear whether dealing with misinformation has become significantly better — at least by social media channels themselves. Due to associations with fake news, the main social media channels have used firmer editorial power to harvest misinformation and other harmful content on their sites.

For instance, in October 2017, a US-based NGO NLPC reported how Facebook, Twitter and YouTube censored conservative, right-wing content on their sites. By the end of the year, both Facebook and Google informed us about their decision to increase the number of moderators by 10,000 in order to maintain general internet safety and a code of conduct on their sites.

These actions have two main flaws: firstly, it gives tech companies a significant amount of editorial power in terms of ethics, defining the standards, possibly limiting a fundamental democratic right: freedom of expression.

Secondly, the working conditions of the moderators remain obscure: it is possible that the moderators remain as contractors rather than employees, who are subjected to significantly low wages and an inability to unionize, which has been the case in the past.

In 2017, the term ‘fake news’ also became popularized and unfortunately, used by politicians in countries suffering from an unstable political situation and limited: Poland, Libya, and Myanmar to name a few. Needless to mention how harmful this may forming civic movements, particularly in contexts where trust in democracy is generally low.

In order to prevent politicians from taking advantage of the situation, it has been suggested that we should give using the term ‘fake news’ altogether, and focus on the promoting on media criticism and media literacy instead.

Consequently, a number of NGOs and companies, such as Mozilla, GAPMIL by UNESCO and EAVI have established projects and initiatives in order to improve media and web literacy.

Even though such attempts are welcomed and a great start, the truth is that facts and media literacy are difficult to sell. Cognitive experiments have proven that people tend to believe they know more than they do, and would rather consume information that confirms their previous beliefs than challenge themselves.

This is why social media mobs, leading to lynching of innocent civilians in the aftermath of Boston Marathon bombings in 2013, and recently in India, where WhatsApp is used as a tool for religious propaganda, are not solely digital issues, either.

The phenomenon is similar to witch-hunting in the Middle Ages, that were also often started by one or two influential individuals that the mass followed. It is partly explained a human tendency for groupthink: a desire for social harmony resulting in irrational group behavior and ignorance of critical evaluation of alternative viewpoints.

Furthermore, as Victoria R. Rubin from Western University, Canada, has argued, people are generally truth-biased. This means that interpersonal messages tend to be judged truthful rather than deceptive, regardless of the actual truth of the messages.

Considering the complexity of the issue, and the our general lack of expertise of distinguishing truth from fiction, it is clear that we also need companies with social responsibility and commitment to distribute truth and facts.

Luckily, by the end of 2017, we have already witnessed a glimmer of hope regarding the future of journalism. As we’ve pointed out earlier, the Guardian’s revenue from supporters recently exceeded that from advertisements for the first time since the newspaper went online.

Likewise, a number of Silicon Valley heretics, such as Justin Rustein, the inventor of the wildly successful Facebook like-button, and Chamath Palihapitiya the former Facebook Vice President for user growth, have raised worries about the rise of the attention economy and its impacts on healthy civic discussion.

Rather than repeating the mantra according to which social media is making the world a better place, they admit deliberately cutting down personal social media use due to its distracting and addictive nature, promoting social interactions fueled by ‘likes, hearts and thumbs ups’, in the words of Chamath Palihapitiya.

Nevertheless these are only examples of two people, they may tell something about the current state of affairs: people are getting bored of misinformation and attention-driven platforms, giving a warm welcome to change.

Therefore, there are also clearly growing demands and a marketplace for platforms like Media Sifter, that enable critical consumption of media and promote civic discussion. We want to challenge the attention economy by introducing the evidence economy, where users are rewarded based on their contribution and reviewing of facts.

Thankfully, Blockchain — which is at the core of Media Sifter’s design — provides powerful tools for this, and can be used to enhance transparency to a remarkable extent. In 2018, we hope that misuse of the term ‘fake news’ will become history. In addition, we hope that blockchain will be further exploited towards the common good, and will improve journalism and society on a long-term basis.

A new year’s resolution by Media Sifter is to commit to working towards bringing trust back to the news, promoting media and information literacy on our behalf. Thank you for being with us in the past year. We hope that the 2018 will bring plenty of interesting debates and conversations that you can be a continue to partake as well.

If you are still unsure about how the technology behind the Media Sifter platform works, read more about our token model, and check out our most read article from 2017, where we explain how a decentralized community can truth-hack Fake News on Blockchain.

And in case you haven’t already, join our community on Telegram and / or Slack.

Happy New Year!

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