The 80th Block: Publishers and content creators' ethics policies must always be updated
In reality, many have to start by having one in the first place.
This week…
Inspired by The Verge’s update (Nilay Patey, The Verge) on its background policy (ie. when a spokesperson says something “on background” and the journalist has to write about it as though they magically know this inside information), I take a surface look at ethics policies beyond news publications: streaming services, social media, and Pinterest. Yes, Pinterest.
Here’s a selection of these stories, a few personal recommendations, and the chart of the week.
‘Politics-as-sports’: Why it matters
The Atlantic’s James Fallow’s essay on his newsletter Breaking the News:
A major Democratic-backed bill passed with bipartisan support, and the nation’s leading newspaper framed it as a scramble backward for “Democrats.”
The roughly 40 paragraphs of the story that followed, from the front page to a long inside jump, were strictly about the politics, deal-making, factional maneuvers, and polling implications of the bill. The story’s only glancing mention of its contents was as follows:
“Passage of the infrastructure legislation would be a much-needed and long-delayed victory for Mr. Biden—and a welcome break for Democrats, who could spend next week’s Veterans Day break traveling to their districts to show off the roads, bridges, tunnels, transit lines and airports due for a huge infusion of federal support.”
That is: roads, bridges, tunnels, airports, and so forth were significant mainly as near-term talking points. This would be the appropriate framing if you were a pollster or a Congressional staffer. Less so for anyone else.
A few hours later, the Times’s revised online version of the story had added some mentions of the bill’s contents. Which means, interestingly: under the previous night’s intense deadline pressure to make the print edition, the aspect the paper chose to stress was the how of party politics. When it had time later on, it got around to the what.
This essay includes front-page headlines framing the news like they are sports coverage: “Biden gets infrastructure package across the finish line,” and “How bill to fix infrastructure survived brawl”.
Lost in translation: The global streaming boom is creating a severe translator shortage
Andrew Deck for Rest of World:
Last month, bilingual Korean-American influencer Youngmi Mayer took to TikTok and Twitter, bemoaning what she considered to be botched English subtitles on Netflix’s hit series Squid Game. She argued that important nuances had been lost in translation. Others chimed in: the French and Hindi subtitles were junk too, and the English dubbing was a joke. Although many translation professionals say that the criticism was unfair, the pile-on was picked up by major news outlets.
The controversy drew a bright spotlight onto a rarely discussed industry at the heart of major international streaming platforms: language service providers, or LSPs. These are companies that provide outsourced subtitling, captioning, and dubbing through a global network of contract subtitle translators, voice-over actors, translation editors, and sound mixers. It also underscored a looming concern for streaming services: a shortage of quality translators who can handle an increasingly global audience.
How Pinterest utterly ruined photo search on the internet
Chris Stokel-Walker for Input:
More than 28,000 Chrome users have installed Unpinterested!, an extension to remove Pinterest from Google search results, while countless others trade tips on how to craft search queries to exclude the photo-sharing website. The problem? Pinterest makes it obnoxiously difficult to view any image hosted on its platform without signing up for an account.
And it’s managed to achieve an extremely strong presence on many popular image searches. This state of affairs creates friction in the image-grabbing process, which has been fine-tuned over the last 20 years to become as frictionless as possible. And it’s all seemingly for the goal of boosting Pinterest user numbers.
Pinterest, it should be noted, doesn’t cost anything to sign up for. But as the old internet maxim goes, “If you’re not paying for it, you are the product.’” Meanwhile, people who do use the service complain that the resolution of Pinterest images is often low.
Unpinterested!’s creator, South African developer Sello Mkantjwa, tells Input he created the extension three years ago out of frustration. “I used to do a lot of image searches,” he says. “I’d do a search for a scarf or something, and the first 10 results would come up as Pinterest. A lot of the images are interesting when they come up in the results. You’d click on it, and get asked to create an account in order to get access to that image.”
Facebook allows stolen content to flourish, its researchers warned ($)
Keach Hagey and Jeff Horwitz for WSJ:
Facebook has allowed plagiarized and recycled content to flourish on its platform despite having policies against it, the tech giant’s researchers warned in internal memos.
About 40% of the traffic to Facebook pages at one point in 2018 went to pages that stole or repurposed most of their content, according to a research report that year by Facebook senior data scientist Jeff Allen, one of a dozen internal communications reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Pages are used by businesses and organizations to disseminate content on Facebook, while individual users put content on what Facebook calls “profiles.”
The researchers also wrote Facebook has been slow to crack down on copyright infringement for fear of opening itself to legal liability.
“What’s the easiest (lowest effort) way to make a big Facebook Page?” Mr. Allen wrote in an internal slide presentation the following year. “Step 1: Find an existing, engaged community on [Facebook]. Step 2: Scrape/Aggregate content popular in that community. Step 3: Repost most popular content on your Page.”
The same is true for Facebook’s Instagram. Viral TikTok and YouTube videos are almost always originally produced on the platforms, as do posts on Reddit and most tweets on Twitter—although I’m starting to see the latter increasingly boosting viral tweets of screenshots or reposts from other social media networks.
What I read, watch and listen to…
I’m reading Drinks and dresses — and the stalkers who notice them, yet another interesting online safety and OSINT exercise by Natalia Antonova.
I’m watching Sky’s Cobra: Cyberwar, which depicts the British prime minister’s Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms (COBRA) committees as they deal with major crises. The second season focuses on a cyberattack on a town’s water supply.
I’m listening to Jargon: We love to hate it, an episode on Science Diction about plain language advocacy.
Chart of the week
Florian Zandt tables the number of publicly known ransomware attacks by sector so far this year for Statista:
Ransomware is one of the fastest-growing malware threats in recent history, especially as it targets critical industries, such as healthcare (CBC Newfoundland and Labrador), which forces the hands of the service providers to pay up or reckon with devastating service disruptions.