I didn't read the news today, oh boy
Plus Hollywood's actors go on strike over the AI threat to acting
Last Friday, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri made an observation about his and Mark Zuckerberg’s ambitions for Threads, the fast-growing text sibling of Instagram which he’s also in charge of:
As you might expect, the idea that politics and news were not going to get special emphasis on a network that looks, on current run rate, as though it will surpass Twitter in size in a few months was not popular among journalists and politicians, who are absolutely convinced that the work they do should be doted over by everyone in the land all the time. The reason I know this is because I’m a journalist: I’m completely aware of how the people in this trade regard themselves. (One would expect that accountants and interior decorators view the importance of what they do in the same way, but they don’t have the same outlet to express that belief.)
Notice the implication in what Mosseri wrote: that encouraging the transmission of politics and hard news across your network makes it an angry place for conversations. That, however, is not really what Mosseri (or Zuckerberg) wants, because angry places make for much more difficult moderation challenges.
Mosseri’s announcement did not make everyone happy, however. Here was one of the replies:
If you were Mosseri, would you read this and think: “hmm, absolutely right, the world needs to have a place for verified breaking news”? Or might you instead think “the correlation between ‘offering verified breaking news’ and ‘become a cesspool of hate’ is pretty strong, so might want to hold off that”?
Obviously, from a social warming point of view, politics especially and news only slightly less so have enormous potential to divide people. Whatever the issue, you can nowadays find a politician and a news outlet which will reinforce your belief that The Other Side Is Getting Away With It Again, which will make you anywhere from mildly to very infuriated, and thus prone to write angry statements on social media in response. Then people from the other side of the debate see your post, through the magic of the algorithm, and tell you that you’re an idiot. And we’re off to the races.
But what if it wasn’t like that? What if news didn’t get special treatment? There has long been an assumption (particularly strong among journalists) that if you run a social network then you have to give news a special place; that that’s the only way to get people to spend time reading things on your Fab New App.
In fact, this isn’t true. In the offline world, people don’t spend a lot a time reading news. A study in 2017 found that people spent 40 minutes a day reading print newspapers. Wa-hey!
But then… only 30 seconds reading news online.
That’s awful. But for news organisations, it’s the reality: social networks aren’t good sources of visitors to their sites. Twitter and Facebook were far better as sources of stories.
However news organisations, and journalists, have long had the wrong idea about news, and what news is. Most think that “news” is The Big Important Stuff. Some of it does indeed matter: the invasion of Ukraine put up energy prices and food prices here in the UK; Liz Truss’s appalling mini-budget didn’t mean a few pence on your tax bill, it meant mortgage rises and less money for public services.
But a lot of other stuff isn’t Big Important Stuff, it’s just filler. Knowing it or not knowing it won’t actually make any difference to your day, or week, or month. My giant epiphany was when I went to a seminar in 2005 to figure out what effect the internet would have on news organisations. We mostly got it wrong, but one person—not a journalist—said that in the morning they’d get up and look through their RSS feeds (it was that long ago) for “stuff I care about, stuff I want to pass on”.
And that is what news is. It’s the perfect definition. Ukraine invading Russia? Not going to make much difference, but maybe interesting to discuss; and particularly relevant if you have Ukrainian relatives. However the realisation that it will put up energy prices suddenly makes it something you care about too. More recently, the woeful tale of the BBC presenter and the younger person’s perhaps-saucy pictures has occupied a huge amount of airtime and web column inches; it affects almost nobody, yet at the same time the salacious detail—and the potential status benefit in knowing who it might be before your peers—makes for a story that’s irresistible to our desire to gossip. In vain do professors of journalism insist that No, That’s Not News. (And I have engaged with one professor of journalism—no, not that one—on this sort of discussion.) Any academic who doesn’t recognise that journalism is essentially unbounded, because humans’ interest in almost anything is unbounded, is leading their students astray.
In that sense, social networks are absolutely chock-full of news. The problem for news organisations is that that news isn’t necessarily stuff that they produce, or can get paid for. Journalism is information arbitrage: finding out something in one place, and then getting someone somewhere else to pay for it (whether through a subscription to your site, or by the proxy of being shown an advert, or a combination of both). But social networks break down the distance between the source of information and the consumer, and hollow out the potential for that arbitrage.
That detail from the 2017 survey, of only 30 seconds spent reading news online, probably remains more or less true. And Mosseri’s point about politics and news being connected to an angrier network is surely true: he’s seen enough of it through his time at Facebook. So for those hoping to see far more prominence in some sort of news feed on Threads for, well, “news”—stop hoping. It isn’t going to happen. That’s not to say that there aren’t plenty of news organisations on there; they’re making the shift, because if there’s marginal engagement to be had from a free social network, you’d be a fool to turn it down, especially these days. But if Threads declares a pivot to video, I don’t think the news organisations currently tweeting/threading on there will follow suit. They’ve been burned enough times, and they should know too when they’re not really welcome.
That said, I couldn’t help eyerolling at many of the early takes on Threads. No lists! No content search, only account search! No edit button! No reverse chronological timeline as an alternative to the algorithmic one!
Come on. Unlike Google+, which was confusing from day one (12 years ago!), Threads states its simplicity right from the start. You don’t have to be a genius to know that the first aim was just to get the thing to rise out of the sea like Godzilla and keep it standing. That having been done, Mosseri could offer his own observations/to-do list:
And you can get an idea of what he thinks of the network by his choices of who to repost. First, a Chrissy Teigen observation:
And then, a repost of a Mr Beast giveaway—a Tesla (Model 3, looks like) to a random follower. Both those give a clue to the sort of atmosphere Mosseri is after: the Mr Beast giveaway is real, unlike the fake crypto scams that plague Twitter. Teigen was usually a fun presence on Twitter, until the hellscape just became too much.
So with post search (which implies hashtags) and edit buttons probably on the way, I’d expect that lists will be on Mosseri’s er, list too. It won’t take that long before Threads is basically a feature-complete version of Twitter, but with more people and in theory less tendency to anger. We’ll have to see how the latter bit works out. But for now, I’m optimistic on Mosseri’s behalf. Which a couple of weeks ago would have been news to me.
Glimpses of the AI tsunami
(Of the what? Read here.)
• The Hollywood actors’ union is on strike, partly because of a proposal from studios which would let the studios use background actors’ digital likenesses in perpetuity to create new content. Not what actors want to hear! Today it’s the background actors, tomorrow it’s the foreground, the day after it’s the stars. What’s amazing is that this is essentially the premise of Joan Is Awful, an amazing Black Mirror episode in the new series on Netflix. Which you might have to watch again and again, because with both the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors’ Guild of America on strike, you aren’t going to be getting much new content on your streaming service.
• On Twitter, “Karpi” wrote: “I’ve asked an AI to generate a trailer for a HEIDI movie and now I can never sleep again”. See how your insomnia stands up to this; I found it absolutely fascinating, in the manner of a terrifying dream you can’t wake from and yet are also enraptured by the question of “what the hell will happen next?” And because it’s a computer guessing at what a human would do next—but only guessing, mind you—it’s not what you expect.
• You can buy Social Warming in paperback, hardback or ebook via One World Publications, or order it through your friendly local bookstore. Or listen to me read it on Audible.
You could also sign up for The Overspill, a daily list of links with short extracts and brief commentary on things I find interesting in tech, science, medicine, politics and any other topic that takes my fancy.
• I’m the proposed Class Representative for a lawsuit against Google in the UK on behalf of publishers. If you sold open display ads in the UK after 2014, you might be a member of the class. Read more at Googleadclaim.co.uk. (Or see the press release.)
• Back next week! Or leave a comment here, or in the Substack chat, or Substack Notes, or write it in a letter and put it in a bottle so that The Police write a song about it after it falls through a wormhole and goes back in time.
Couple of thoughts:
1. I have trouble believing anything a CEO says. What about the ads, algorithms, monetization, eventual enshittification?
2. Short form tweets and threads are geared to make people incensed. No getting around that.
3. To avoid the anger-mode from these short posts, it’s much better to read more long-form news. For example, Heather Cox Richardson will explain an issue in much greater and balanced detail and give the reader a much better explanation of a hot news item than a tweet, or for that matter a Fox News blurb. Unfortunately, no one wants to read and many would rather or are happy to be incensed It’s part of the entertainment value and good for monetization (which is why Threads exists to begin with!)
I probably qualify as an infovore (well, anyone who is reading these pages at Notes probably does) and I have noticed something about the old inverted pyramid, news scanning, and the web.
In the days of print you bought the whole newspaper, but perhaps you only needed to scan all the headlines to be an informed citizen.
Now you can use an aggregator, Google News are even better Memorandum, to provide those headlines for you, without actually going or buying.
You can do a quick scan.
It does make journalism a hard business. The work and service are provided with the headline.