Social Media and News no Longer Mix
Social Media and News no Longer Mix
Everything that made Twitter and FB invaluable in a crisis is disappearing
Sree’s newsletter is produced with Zach Peterson (@zachprague). Digimentors Tech Tip from Robert S. Anthony (@newyorkbob). Our sponsorship kit. The image above was generated on Jasper.ai using the following enhanced prompt: “Create a photorealistic digital art piece that features a dark collage of Twitter logo on top of an apocalyptic cityscape with Elon Musk running through the streets. Use dark lighting and bold colors.”
🤖 New AI workshop in NYC and REMOTE! Join us for my workshop and an all-star panel (Aimee Rinehart, Mikhael Simmonds and more) about all things AI. Thursday, Nov 9, 6-8 pm ET in Manhattan and online. If you can't attend in-person, you can purchase an online ticket and watch online. Both tickets offer a recording you can watch later. Here’s a code for 25% off, just for YOU! Use code “newsletter”… bit.ly/sreeainov9
[Know someone who can’t afford to pay? Have them email me: sree@digimentors.group]
***
IN 2011, YEARS BEFORE HE JOINED CNN HIMSELF, Brian Stelter tweeted: “When I hear CNN's breaking news music, my instinct now is to check Twitter.” For 15 years now, Twitter has been my number-one source of news during any crisis. From the Mumbai attacks to the Boston Marathon bombing to Russia’s war on Ukraine, that’s where I turned first for news, information and updates.
Two days after Hamas’s evil slaughter of Israeli civilians, I woke up and did something I hadn’t done before the Twitter era: Turned on CNN on my YouTube TV instead of reading Twitter.
We’ve been in a social news death spiral for years, and the time has come to admit it. A lot of people have already moved on anyway.
A decade of “social media companies haven’t learned their lesson” headlines after every election, major news story and international event has me thinking that the companies have indeed learned their collective lesson: Get as far away from news as possible. The problem of disinformation and propaganda could have been handled a different way. Instead, as Jim Edwards writes in Press Gazette: Google has dialled down the prominence of news sites in its rankings. Facebook has walked away from the news business almost entirely. X, formerly known as Twitter, has become a toxic, unhappy place under new owner Elon Musk.
Twitter, of course, did not “learn a lesson” so much as it imploded under the weight of Musk’s ego (and reckless changes by him and CEO Linda Yaccarino), and maybe that’s the worst part of all of this. There was at least one platform that, while far (far!) from perfect, could still provide a sense of what was going on, why it was happening, and more. There was rampant disinformation, misinformation, and general know-nothingness, but it was also possible to sift through it all and find some semblance of the truth. Now, it’s experts with three decades of experience putting together a thread that explains a situation followed by replies from paid-for blue-checkmark-guys with handles like @DrownTheLibs at the top of the replies with all sorts of nonsense.
In the end, news is clearly more work than it’s worth for the social media giants, they all know it, and their shareholders want to make the most money possible. Threads, which still has a good chance to be a successor to Twitter, is taking pains to keep the focus away from news. Here’s Instagram head Adam Mosseri earlier this month:
We’re not anti-news. News is clearly already on Threads. People can share news; people can follow accounts that share news. We’re not going to get in the way of any either. But, we’re also not going go to amplify news on the platform. To do so would be too risky given the maturity of the platform, the downsides of over-promising, and the stakes.
The use of the word “risky” is very telling. Mosseri has seen up close how Facebook has handled news, the many initiatives with news orgs, the money, the scrutiny, the “Facebook has a misinformation” problem headlines, the fines, the Congressional hearings, and so on, and is acting accordingly.
One silver lining in all this might be LinkedIn. Again from Press Gazette, in an interview with Daniel Roth, who is Editor-in-Chief of LI, who is doubling down on news:
“News is essential to us,” Roth says. “You cannot get ahead in your business or your career without knowing what’s going on in the world. It is important that people be able to see headlines and in-depth stories and analysis that makes them better understand the world.”
Why do anything with news at all, and why be benevolent about it if we do? This is what every other social media board room was asking itself over the last decade, and their unanimous response has been to run like the wind away from any sort of scrutiny-inducing news product.
Lesson learned, indeed.
Here are my other essays on Musk (I’ve got to stop writing about him!):
In 2018, I wrote that Musk should get off Twitter. Now he owns it 🤦🏾♂️ (Aug 6, 2023)
If Linda Yaccarino Can't Save Twitter, No One Can (May 24, 2023)
Six months of Elon, the Boss Baby (April 14, 2023)
Elon Musk and Right-wing Grift: A Match Made in Heaven (Dec. 5, 2022)
Elon Musk Era Begins at Twitter (Nov. 4, 2022)
Elon Musk Can Be a Force For Good, But… (May 5, 2022)
— Sree / Twitter | Instagram | LinkedIn | YouTube | Threads
⚒️ NEWISH: Digimentors Tools Kit: People are always asking me for recommendations for gadgets, gizmos, websites, etc. So my Digimentors team has created a tools kit we will keep updating. Take a look!
DIGIMENTORS TECH TIP: Family Fun Gets Spotlight at 2023 New York Toy Fair
By Robert S. Anthony
Each week, veteran tech journalist Bob Anthony shares a tech tip you don’t want to miss. Follow him @newyorkbob.
The winter holiday season will be here soon enough and with it comes extra doses of family time—for better or worse. In addition to the usual explosion of plush-filled cuteness, the recent Toy Fair in New York offered plenty of examples of tech toys that families can enjoy together.
The Moonlite Storytime system turns smartphones into projectors that can show images on walls or ceilings as users read bedtime stories to young children. The downloaded stories are enhanced with music and other sounds that help children follow along and prompts that let the phone holder know when to advance to the next image.
The system uses a free app and a clip-on projector attachment which holds slide-in picture discs which accompany the downloaded stories. Users of a certain age will notice the resemblance of the Moonlite picture discs with iconic View-Master discs, which are much larger and must be used with a special viewer.
Once a story is activated on the phone, the user can start reading at his own pace and advance the images as needed, playing sounds by clicking buttons in the mobile app. Moonlite stories and the projector can be purchased alone or in packages like the Disney Pixar 4 Story Collection, which includes a projector plus Cars, Monsters Inc., The Incredibles and Toy Story: Toys That Go Bump in the Night.
For older family members, KAI: The Artificial Intelligence Robot from Thames & Kosmos challenges users from the moment the box is opened. It doesn’t come assembled—you have to take the time to build the $100 unit from more than 100 pieces before you can give it its first command.
Once built, however, KAI, which is outfitted with a camera and microphone, can be taught to respond to hand gestures and sounds, using machine learning to improve its responses the more it’s taught. The robot can also be controlled directly from a mobile app. The six-legged robot can move in all directions and rotate its body 360 degrees.
Toy Fair attendees at the Javits Convention Center were stunned when it was announced that the show would skip 2024 entirely, resume in March 2025 but then leave New York for New Orleans after a more-than-100-year run in the city.
After a loud wave of negative feedback, however, show officials flip-flopped and rescinded the move days later, saying that Toy Fair had “recommitted to New York and the Javits Center.” For many, the sudden turnaround was a veritable “Miracle on 34th St.”
Did we miss anything? Make a mistake? Do you have an idea for anything we’re up to? Let’s collaborate! sree@sree.net and please connect w/ me: Twitter | Instagram | LinkedIn | YouTube / Cameo.
🤖 New AI workshop in NYC and REMOTE! Join us for my workshop and an all-star panel (Aimee Rinehart, Mikhael Simmonds and more) about all things AI. Thursday, Nov 9, 6-8 pm ET in Manhattan and online. If you can't attend in-person, you can purchase an online ticket and watch online. Both tickets offer a recording you can watch later. Here’s a code for 25% off, just for YOU! Use code “newsletter”… bit.ly/sreeainov9
[Know someone who can’t afford to pay? Have them email me: sree@digimentors.group]
***
You''ve summed up so well the sad state of news and social media. I hope you're right about LI, but there are so many other issues there. First is that it is not an easy platform to use. Before you have an account, you need to set up a profile that, in order to benefit you, has to be involved. Second is the way marketing has flooded the platform. But if one is connected in the right way, LI is invaluable while the rest of social media pulls down its shutters so news can't get in.