Cowardly New World: Alternative Media Under Attack By Algorithms
By Kollibri Terre Sonnenblume, www.counterpunch.org
October 30th, 2017
Above Photo: Ironlak/ Flickr
An insidious assault is underway against alternative media on the internet.
Leftist and progressive websites have been suffering significant declines in
traffic. Some have had online income sources cut. Many others have been
publicly defamed.
Who is behind this onslaught? Must be Trump and the Republicans, right?
Nope. It was started by the Democratic leadership during the 2016 election
campaign and is being executed by liberal-leaning tech giants, mainly Google
and Facebook. Essential to the fight has been the mainstream media, which
has been doing what it does best: fanning the flames of fear.
Lest you think I am painting a picture of a tightly-organized, top-down
conspiracy here, let me assure you that I am not. Some right-wing
alternative media outlets have been doing so, because they too have been
attacked by the same parties and that's where they go with it, but they miss
key aspects of the big picture. (I.e., anyone who believes Obama was a
Marxist has a lot to learn!) By naming the Democratic leadership, tech
companies and mainstream media, I am merely pointing at participants, not
describing a cabal, though they are certainly united in the common concerns
of their class.
The trouble started about a year ago, just after the election, when the
"fake news" meme suddenly surged through mainstream media channels.
Allegedly, fake news stories had been planted in social media by Russians in
order to help Trump win the election. This was the line being peddled by the
defeated Clinton staff and much of the mainstream media enthusiastically
took it up. At the time, I predicted that this meme would be used to attack
alternative media sooner or later.
In December, the Washington Post published a hit piece sourced almost solely
on the unsubstantiated claims of a shadowy, anonymous organization called
"Prop or Not," which listed 200 alternative media outlets from across the
political spectrum as purveyors of Russian propaganda. What this diverse
collection actually had in common was that none were friends of the
Democratic Part. They became the prime targets of a rapidly developing
witch-hunt that continues to the present day. (This Washington Post article
was well-skewered at the time by Joshua Frank: "CounterPunch as Russian
Propagandists: the Washington Post's Shallow Smear")
Then, in April '17, Google implemented 'Project Owl,' ostensibly aimed at
reducing the prominence of "fake news" in its searches. The program utilized
"algorithmic updates to surface more authoritative content" (there's some
technonewspeak!) and to downgrade "offensive" material. In the weeks that
followed, many leftist and progressive websites saw double-digit percentage
declines in the traffic referred to them from Google searches. Among these
were Alternet (-63%), Democracy Now!(-36%), Common Dreams(-37%), Truth-Out
(-25%), The Intercept (-19%) and Counterpunch (-21%). The steepest decline
was experienced by the World Socialist Web Site (wsws.org), whose search
traffic fell by two-thirds.
David North, director of wsws.org, didn't mince words about this state of
affairs:
There is no innocent explanation for the extraordinarily sharp fall in
readers, virtually overnight, coming from Google searches. Google's claim
that it is protecting readers from 'fake news' is a politically motivated
lie. Google, a massive monopoly, with the closest ties to the state and
intelligence agencies, is blocking access to the WSWS and other left and
progressive web sites through a system of rigged searches.
"The actions of Google constitute political censorship and are a blatant
attack on free speech. At a time when public distrust of establishment media
is widespread, this corporate giant is exploiting its monopolistic position
to restrict public access to a broad spectrum of news and critical analysis.
Facebook has been accused of "censoring" alternative media as well in its
efforts to suppress "fake news," and it, too, is using algorithms for the
first pass on uploaded content. Humans raters are involved on further
identification and labeling, but considering the sheer mass of posts to that
platform, their participation must relate to only a tiny minority of the
content that is affected.
Youtube, which is owned by Google, is also utilizing algorithms but for the
purpose of deciding which videos are eligible to be "monetized," which is to
say, which videos can generate revenue for their creators by featuring
advertising, usually as a short clip before the main feature. Over the last
year, countless videos and many channels have been "demonetized" in a
process that has raised the ire of many creators and viewers. Accusations of
political bias have been common.
Some would argue that it's only "censorship" when the government does it.
However, in these days of digital dominance by a small number of entities
with near monopolies, I think the discussion is different. As Thomas Knapp
recently asked in CounterPunch, when it comes to social media, "When Does
'Actively Working With the Government' Become Censorship?" He writes:
At what point does 'actively working with the government' and 'partnering
with public authorities' cease to be private, albeit civic-minded, market
activity and become de facto government activity? Or, to put it differently,
when does it cease to be merely 'you can't talk like that in my living room'
(exercise of legitimate property rights) and start becoming 'you can't talk
like that, period' (censorship)? My own answer: When Mark Zuckerberg starts
using the phrase 'actively working with the government' as if that's a good
thing, we're well into the danger zone.
There is little recourse that can be sought with any of these media giants
by those who have been algo-ed out, whether they are individual creators or
alternative media organizations. Sure, each corporation has an appeals
process, but a quick search on the topic turns up a load of angry stories
about content that is disappeared or demonetized that can't be brought back
or remonetized.
On the use of algorithms by Google to rank search results, the New York
Times stated: "Google said hundreds of factors go into its search algorithm
and the formula is also constantly evolving. The company said it conducted
150,000 search experiments and implemented 1,600 changes last year. This is
why it's hard to pinpoint exactly why search traffic plummets for a site
like the World Socialist Web Site."
Here, the Times was playing its usual role of trivializing accusations of
bad behavior by conventional power brokers and marginalizing their accusers.
However, in this case they also unwittingly revealed how the use of
algorithms is eroding human responsibility. By placing the blame on the
complexity and ever-changing nature of the algorithm, all the individual
people at Google are excused, from programmer to rater to CEO, to say
nothing of partners and stockholders. In other words, algorithms are making
for a cowardly new world.
But is the Times just being coy? Who says "it's hard to pinpoint exactly why
search traffic plummets" for a particular site? The Times or Google? The way
the sentence is written, it is not at all clear. And is it even true? If
someone with the technical knowledge to understand the algorithm sat down
and went through it, would they really not be able to figure out how
wsws.org has been so consistently omitted? I have my doubts about that and I
suspect that the Times is eliding this point due to their own institutional
bias.
These issues exist in a wider context than media. The accusations of "fake
news" and attacks on alternative media have gone hand-in-hand with the
larger anti-Russian campaign that the Democrats have been waging since at
least early 2016 (and which is nothing new in US history). Recall that in
mid-2016, when Wikileaks released damaging information about the Democrats
and Clinton's campaign, the party's reaction was to accuse Wikileaks of
working with the Russians who, they alleged, had hacked into their
computers. This fabrication has survived to the present day despite its
nakedly partisan tone and its sound debunking on technical grounds and
despite the fact that Wikileaks has released many thousands of documents
critical of the Russians, too.
For whatever reasons (perhaps at the behest of John Brennan, suggests Mike
Whitney), the Democratic leadership has been working to manufacture
anti-Russian sentiment in the U.S. population. I have personally found this
alarming (and I haven't been the only one). And if one has been interested
in stories that call "bullshit!" on the Dems and their neo-McCarthyite
Russiagate conspiracy theories, the only place to go has been the
alternative media. The same alternative media now under assault. Hmm. How
about that?
Not all alternative media is created equal, though, and unfortunately, the
right wing of it has been giving far more attention to this story of how
marginal voices are being squashed by the corporate tech giants. For
example, in researching this article, I found precious few voices port-side
of the Dems who were tackling this narrative, though some of them are of
very high quality, such as Robert Parry at Consortium News , Mike Whitney at
CounterPunch and the Intercept. Real life muckrakers, they are.
Writes Bill Boyarsky at TruthDig: "There's a difference between muckraking
and fake news. Determining the difference is too difficult for a computer,
even one with the smartest kind of artificial intelligence."
Of course, the technophiles might counter that it's just a matter of time
until artificial intelligence is "smart" enough to know, but that claim
would ignore the basic rule that computing has always followed:
garbage-in/garbage-out. In this case, the garbage-in is bias, and given the
parties involved, the particular bias is not difficult to describe:
politically moderate, socially liberal, and unquestionably capitalist. Which
is what the alternative media ain't, by definition.
I appreciated Boyarsky's article, but the fundamental issue is not
technological, it's social. In this day and age, most people, including most
people working at big tech companies, can't determine the difference between
muckraking and fake news. They know when something sounds unconventional,
though, and they flag that.
So it is dark times for alternative media, and getting darker. I can see
that I must dedicate more time and energy to supporting alternative media in
whatever ways I can. I urge you, dear reader, to do the same.
To do otherwise is to be subservient to a set of mainstream values and
institutions that not only obfuscate facts and reality but which are also
the driving forces behind war and ecocide. In these times the stakes are
high; too high for partisan loyalties and wishful thinking. The only voices
speaking truth are those on the fringes and we must amplify them however we
can.
+ Read/view alternative media stories and share them in whatever venues you
can.
+ Stop consuming mainstream media and stop posting links to it.
+ Actively support alternative media by donating money, time or other
resources.
+ Stop using Google as your search engine; I recommend DuckDuckGo. You will
be surprised at how much you've been missing.
+ Become the media: take your own photos or video and write up stories
yourself for whatever outlet will take your work, even if that's only your
own blog.
