How is digitalization challenging traditional journalism?
Back in the 1960’s, one of our main channels for news broadcast was television. If people wanted to be informed about the news, they would just, without hesitation, turn on their television and listen to them, even if the content was not always very interesting. Now, with the development of the Internet and smartphones, we have many ways to reach news content. We spend time using applications and especially social networks, and we can easily be overloaded with notifications. Indeed, media houses are facing more competition and have to find new ways to make us want to read their content and even pay for it, among the flow of free content that is reaching us. More and more people feel like they are too busy to read news, so journalists must now produce very short stories, which can be read through easily but which also must catch the reader until the end.
As said previously, people, and especially young people, are now more occupied with these new technologies, which makes them less attracted by traditional ways of reading or listening to news. They might not bother to buy a newspaper or watch television news, but they can easily be reached through their social network feeds. Social media has hence become a new important channel for spreading news. The results of a survey published in the Reuters Institute report of 2019, stated that 45% of people between 18 and 24 years-old use their smartphones as a first way to come across news in the morning while 19% of them use television. According to the same survey, 25% of Americans use social media as a main way to come across news.
The use of social media as a news platform has led to the spreading of so-called “fake news”. There are many definitions of “fake news”, but for this article, I will define them as false information that is spread via traditional media or social media, with the intention to mislead readers, and often with the final goal to damage someone or an entity. With social media, fake news can rapidly reach important numbers of viewers and if viewers believe them, it can have huge impacts. Facebook is working on a way to create alerts for content of questionable legitimacy and you can also find some plugins that provide similar fake news’ flags as you browse the net. However, Facebook’s solution may not work for every content, so journalists must raise awareness on fake news to make people understand that everything is not trustworthy on the Internet and teach them how to verify information. They now also have to build a solid relationship of trust with each reader and make the latter feel close to them.
For instance, one of the new ways to spread fake news is deep fake. “Deep fakes” are media that take a person’s video or picture and replace their face with someone else’s, using Machine Learning algorithms to make it look like real. It is indeed possible to make a fake video of a famous personality saying or doing something that he or she never said or did. Yle, Finland’s national public broadcasting company, published in its website a deep fake video of Finnish President Sauli Niinistö with the legend “this is a so-called deep fake video — a fake video created with artificial intelligence” in order to show to their readers the power and credibility of deep fakes.
The other challenge I would like to mention in this article is related to the personalized and targeted content we see on social media. Social media companies like Facebook are constantly collecting data about our use of their platforms: about what kind of content we are liking, commenting, what videos we are watching… With this data, they can put us into “categories” and show us targeted ads and content. Some populists have also been very good at using this kind of data for their campaigns. For instance, the “Cambridge Analytica scandal” of 2018 revealed that the consulting firm Cambridge Analytica had collected personal data of millions of people on their Facebook profiles without their consent and used it for political advertising purposes. The problem is that these targeted campaigns are difficult to spot by media. Indeed, journalists did not know that people would vote that much for Brexit, for Donald Trump or even for the Finns Party in Finnish parliament elections of 2011 and 2015.
Finally, it is a real struggle for journalists to explain what is happening in the digital world: who is seeing what on social media, which groups are targeted with certain content, and how new political tools and fake news affect us, because this whole phenomena is still relatively new, and social media data and algorithms are difficult to access.
References:
-http://www.digitalnewsreport.org/, Section 2.5 How Younger Generations Consume News Differently (p.55)
-https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/dec/18/what-is-fake-news-pizzagate
-Yle deep fake video: https://areena.yle.fi/1-50273813
