"Efforts to reach voters with trusted information are becoming more difficult as tech platforms lean into viral trends, instead of quality news."<p>The snake is eating itself. What is most dangerous about the current situation is now how easy it is to pull the natural strings of the western world order. Democracy. The ballot referendum. How you "vote" with your dollar. All of these things could always have been tightly influenced and controlled, but this was done more or less through an indirect incentive structure that favored existing large investment.<p>Now, anything is able to use these social media tools to run around existing capital structure and get whatever message out to voters and consumers directly. What captures the consciousness now isn't necessarily a consensus of an economies major investors, but simply whatever is able to abuse the viral phenomenon the best at the time and in the context.<p>Coupled with the ease of generating high quality propaganda of any shape or form through various publicly released tools, we are in for interesting times, for sure.
Browsing news sites became such an unpleasant experience that I'd like to avoid it at all cost. I'm not even talking about the content, just in terms of usability these sites are a disaster. Visiting a news site will only rob me of my time and nerves, so why would I?
I wonder how much X/Twitter turning to noise has affected this.<p>Even if traffic directly from Twitter wasn't necessarily a big portion of incoming traffic, I feel like Twitter was a place that many people were using to hear about links, which would then get reshared around. People are exposed to a lot less variety now, with many folks dispersed elsewhere and the noise being so high on twitter/x. Our masses of friends are no longer there to help surface the more interesting bits.
"The over-reliance on social media traffic kept news publishers from focusing on building stronger consumer products of their own.<p>Publishers are better prepared now to defend their intellectual property in the AI era having learned from their mistakes of being too heavily reliant on third parties for survival."
This other Axios post today about Meta's news leader stepping down also has some interesting points about the context in which this drop has taken place.<p><a href="https://www.axios.com/2023/10/03/campbell-brown-meta-news-exit" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.axios.com/2023/10/03/campbell-brown-meta-news-ex...</a>
I used to get most of my weekly news feed from BBC satirical shows - each week I would have 30 minutes catching up on which politician did what and why. ait was not a bad (domestic) round up and I think a few youtube channels could crawl out and create the replacements. Or exhale it's podcasts that are doing it.<p>But either way if there is a vacuum ...
The article talks about how these "top news sites" (which they don't seem to define) contain "quality information" and "trusted information" - but is that really true?<p>Even sites that had a very good reputation like the BBC have increasingly been dumbing down their content and posting more clickbait in the last few years, and there are plenty of popular news sites (Fox, Daily Mail, etc) that are full of misinformation and trash.<p>There are several news sites that I used to regularly read (both global and local news) which I've given up on, because the combination of lower quality content, clickbait and terrible UX means that they no longer feel like they're worth reading.<p>So perhaps they need to consider whether some of this decrease in sharing on social media is down to the decrease in quality of the news sites themselves.
""Regulatory pressure and free speech concerns have pushed tech giants to abandon efforts to elevate quality information."""<p>Ahh yeah, before the free speech concerns the quality of information was top notch. Really. It was only because of free speech concerns the bar was dropped. Sums it about right.<p>Tech giants never provided quality information. Social media platform were always full of disinformation, misinformation.<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-op...</a><p>Legacy media (tv, newspapers) was also used for propaganda. Social media is only continuation of propaganda of corporate interests, governments, people of power, celebrities.
I imagine it is the hot dream of Microsoft and its suppliers to reduce news sites traffic to mostly just LLM. Google and Meta are regulated out of existence, and average Joe pays to access information through ChatGPT.