Project Push creates an archive of news alerts from around the world


Article by Neel Dhanesha: “A little over a year ago, Matt Taylor began to feel like he was getting a few too many push notifications from the BBC News app.

It’s a feeling many of us can probably relate to. Many people, myself included, have turned off news notifications entirely in the past few months. Taylor, however, went in the opposite direction.

Instead of turning off notifications, he decided to see how the BBC — the most popular news app in the U.K., where Taylor lives —  compared to other news organizations around the world. So he dug out an old Google Pixel phone, downloaded 61 news apps onto it, and signed up for push notifications on all of them.

As notifications roll in, a custom-built script (made with the help of ChatGPT) uploads their text to a server and a Bluesky page, providing a near real-time view of push notifications from services around the world. Taylor calls it Project Push.

People who work in news “take the front page very seriously,” said Taylor, a product manager at the Financial Times who built Project Push in his spare time. “There are lots of editors who care a lot about that, but actually one of the most important people in the newsroom is the person who decides that they’re going to press a button that sends an immediate notification to millions of people’s phones.”

The Project Push feed is a fascinating portrait of the news today. There are the expected alerts — breaking news, updates to ongoing stories like the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, the latest shenanigans in Washington — but also:

— Updates on infrastructure plans that, without the context, become absolutely baffling (a train will instead be a bus?).

— Naked attempts to increase engagement.

— Culture updates that some may argue aren’t deserving of a push alert from the Associated Press.

— Whatever this is.

Taylor tells me he’s noticed some geographic differences in how news outlets approach push notifications. Publishers based in Asia and the Middle East, for example, send far more notifications than European or American ones; CNN Indonesia alone pushed about 17,000 of the 160,000 or so notifications Project Push has logged over the past year…(More)”.

How Media Ownership Matters


Book by Rodney Benson, Mattias Hessérus, Timothy Neff, and Julie Sedel: “Does it matter who owns and funds the media? As journalists and management consultants set off in search of new business models, there’s a pressing need to understand anew the economic underpinnings of journalism and its role in democratic societies.

How Media Ownership Matters provides a fresh approach to understanding news media power, moving beyond the typical emphasis on market concentration or media moguls. Through a comparative analysis of the US, Sweden, and France, as well as interviews of news executives and editors and an original collection of industry data, this book maps and analyzes four ownership models: market, private, civil society, and public. Highlighting the effects of organizational logics, funding, and target audiences on the content of news, the authors identify both the strengths and weaknesses various forms of ownership have in facilitating journalism that meets the democratic ideals of reasoned, critical, and inclusive public debate. Ultimately, How Media Ownership Matters provides a roadmap to understanding how variable forms of ownership are shaping the future of journalism and democracy…(More)”.

Prosocial Media


Paper by Glen Weyl et al: “Social media empower distributed content creation by algorithmically harnessing “the social fabric” (explicit and implicit signals of association) to serve this content. While this overcomes the bottlenecks and biases of traditional gatekeepers, many believe it has unsustainably eroded the very social fabric it depends on by maximizing engagement for advertising revenue. This paper participates in open and ongoing considerations to translate social and political values and conventions, specifically social cohesion, into platform design. We propose an alternative platform model that includes the social fabric an explicit output as well as input. Citizens are members of communities defined by explicit affiliation or clusters of shared attitudes. Both have internal divisions, as citizens are members of intersecting communities, which are themselves internally diverse. Each is understood to value content that bridge (viz. achieve consensus across) and balance (viz. represent fairly) this internal diversity, consistent with the principles of the Hutchins Commission (1947). Content is labeled with social provenance, indicating for which community or citizen it is bridging or balancing. Subscription payments allow citizens and communities to increase the algorithmic weight on the content they value in the content serving algorithm. Advertisers may, with consent of citizen or community counterparties, target them in exchange for payment or increase in that party’s algorithmic weight. Underserved and emerging communities and citizens are optimally subsidized/supported to develop into paying participants. Content creators and communities that curate content are rewarded for their contributions with algorithmic weight and/or revenue. We discuss applications to productivity (e.g. LinkedIn), political (e.g. X), and cultural (e.g. TikTok) platforms…(More)”.

Is This How Reddit Ends?


Article by Matteo Wong: “The internet is growing more hostile to humans. Google results are stuffed with search-optimized spam, unhelpful advertisements, and AI slop. Amazon has become littered with undifferentiated junk. The state of social media, meanwhile—fractured, disorienting, and prone to boosting all manner of misinformation—can be succinctly described as a cesspool.

It’s with some irony, then, that Reddit has become a reservoir of humanity. The platform has itself been called a cesspool, rife with hateful rhetoric and falsehoods. But it is also known for quirky discussions and impassioned debates on any topic among its users. Does charging your brother rent, telling your mom she’s an unwanted guest, or giving your wife a performance review make you an asshole? (Redditors voted no, yes, and “everyone sucks,” respectively.) The site is where fans hash out the best rap album ever and plumbers weigh in on how to unclog a drain. As Google has begun to offer more and more vacuous SEO sites and ads in response to queries, many people have started adding reddit to their searches to find thoughtful, human-written answers: find mosquito in bedroom redditfix musty sponge reddit.

But now even Reddit is becoming more artificial. The platform has quietly started beta-testing Reddit Answers, what it calls an “AI-powered conversational interface.” In function and design, the feature—which is so far available only for some users in the U.S.—is basically an AI chatbot. On a new search screen accessible from the homepage, Reddit Answers takes anyone’s queries, trawls the site for relevant discussions and debates, and composes them into a response. In other words, a site that sells itself as a home for “authentic human connection” is now giving humans the option to interact with an algorithm instead…(More)”.

What’s a Fact, Anyway?


Essay by Fergus McIntosh: “…For journalists, as for anyone, there are certain shortcuts to trustworthiness, including reputation, expertise, and transparency—the sharing of sources, for example, or the prompt correction of errors. Some of these shortcuts are more perilous than others. Various outfits, positioning themselves as neutral guides to the marketplace of ideas, now tout evaluations of news organizations’ trustworthiness, but relying on these requires trusting in the quality and objectivity of the evaluation. Official data is often taken at face value, but numbers can conceal motives: think of the dispute over how to count casualties in recent conflicts. Governments, meanwhile, may use their powers over information to suppress unfavorable narratives: laws originally aimed at misinformation, many enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic, can hinder free expression. The spectre of this phenomenon is fuelling a growing backlash in America and elsewhere.

Although some categories of information may come to be considered inherently trustworthy, these, too, are in flux. For decades, the technical difficulty of editing photographs and videos allowed them to be treated, by most people, as essentially incontrovertible. With the advent of A.I.-based editing software, footage and imagery have swiftly become much harder to credit. Similar tools are already used to spoof voices based on only seconds of recorded audio. For anyone, this might manifest in scams (your grandmother calls, but it’s not Grandma on the other end), but for a journalist it also puts source calls into question. Technologies of deception tend to be accompanied by ones of detection or verification—a battery of companies, for example, already promise that they can spot A.I.-manipulated imagery—but they’re often locked in an arms race, and they never achieve total accuracy. Though chatbots and A.I.-enabled search engines promise to help us with research (when a colleague “interviewed” ChatGPT, it told him, “I aim to provide information that is as neutral and unbiased as possible”), their inability to provide sourcing, and their tendency to hallucinate, looks more like a shortcut to nowhere, at least for now. The resulting problems extend far beyond media: election campaigns, in which subtle impressions can lead to big differences in voting behavior, feel increasingly vulnerable to deepfakes and other manipulations by inscrutable algorithms. Like everyone else, journalists have only just begun to grapple with the implications.

In such circumstances, it becomes difficult to know what is true, and, consequently, to make decisions. Good journalism offers a way through, but only if readers are willing to follow: trust and naïveté can feel uncomfortably close. Gaining and holding that trust is hard. But failure—the end point of the story of generational decay, of gold exchanged for dross—is not inevitable. Fact checking of the sort practiced at The New Yorker is highly specific and resource-intensive, and it’s only one potential solution. But any solution must acknowledge the messiness of truth, the requirements of attention, the way we squint to see more clearly. It must tell you to say what you mean, and know that you mean it…(More)”.

The Recommendation on Information Integrity


OECD Recommendation: “…The digital transformation of societies has reshaped how people interact and engage with information. Advancements in digital technologies and novel forms of communication have changed the way information is produced, shared, and consumed, locally and globally and across all media. Technological changes and the critical importance of online information platforms offer unprecedented access to information, foster citizen engagement and connection, and allow for innovative news reporting. However, they can also provide a fertile ground for the rapid spread of false, altered, or misleading content. In addition, new generative AI tools have greatly reduced the barriers to creating and spreading content.

Promoting the availability and free flow of high-quality, evidence-based information is key to upholding individuals’ ability to seek and receive information and ideas of all kinds and to safeguarding freedom of opinion and expression. 

The volume of content to which citizens are exposed can obscure and saturate public debates and help widen societal divisions. In this context, the quality of civic discourse declines as evidence-based information, which helps people make sense of their social environment, becomes harder to find. This reality has acted as a catalyst for governments to explore more closely the roles they can play, keeping as a priority in our democracies the necessity that governments should not exercise control of the information ecosystem and that, on the contrary, they support an environment where a plurality of information sources, views, and opinions can thrive…Building on the detailed policy framework outlined in the OECD report Facts not Fakes: Tackling Disinformation, Strengthening Information Integrity, the Recommendation provides an ambitious and actionable international standard that will help governments develop a systemic approach to foster information integrity, relying on a multi-stakeholder approach…(More)”.

Synthetic Data, Synthetic Media, and Surveillance


Paper by Aaron Martin and Bryce Newell: “Public and scholarly interest in the related concepts of synthetic data and synthetic media has exploded in recent years. From issues raised by the generation of synthetic datasets to train machine learning models to the public-facing, consumer availability of artificial intelligence (AI) powered image manipulation and creation apps and the associated increase in synthetic (or “deepfake”) media, these technologies have shifted from being niche curiosities of the computer science community to become topics of significant public, corporate, and regulatory import. They are emblematic of a “data-generation revolution” (Gal and Lynskey 2024: 1091) that is already raising pressing questions for the academic surveillance studies community. Within surveillance studies scholarship, Fussey (2022: 348) has argued that synthetic media is one of several “issues of urgent societal and planetary concern” and that it has “arguably never been more important” for surveillance studies “researchers to understand these dynamics and complex processes, evidence their implications, and translate esoteric knowledge to produce meaningful analysis.” Yet, while fields adjacent to surveillance studies have begun to explore the ethical risks of synthetic data, we currently perceive a lack of attention to the surveillance implications of synthetic data and synthetic media in published literature within our field. In response, this Dialogue is designed to help promote thinking and discussion about the links and disconnections between synthetic data, synthetic media, and surveillance…(More)”

How The New York Times incorporates editorial judgment in algorithms to curate its home page


Article by Zhen Yang: “Whether on the web or the app, the home page of The New York Times is a crucial gateway, setting the stage for readers’ experiences and guiding them to the most important news of the day. The Times publishes over 250 stories daily, far more than the 50 to 60 stories that can be featured on the home page at a given time. Traditionally, editors have manually selected and programmed which stories appear, when and where, multiple times daily. This manual process presents challenges:

  • How can we provide readers a relevant, useful, and fresh experience each time they visit the home page?
  • How can we make our editorial curation process more efficient and scalable?
  • How do we maximize the reach of each story and expose more stories to our readers?

To address these challenges, the Times has been actively developing and testing editorially driven algorithms to assist in curating home page content. These algorithms are editorially driven in that a human editor’s judgment or input is incorporated into every aspect of the algorithm — including deciding where on the home page the stories are placed, informing the rankings, and potentially influencing and overriding algorithmic outputs when necessary. From the get-go, we’ve designed algorithmic programming to elevate human curation, not to replace it…

The Times began using algorithms for content recommendations in 2011 but only recently started applying them to home page modules. For years, we only had one algorithmically-powered module, “Smarter Living,” on the home page, and later, “Popular in The Times.” Both were positioned relatively low on the page.

Three years ago, the formation of a cross-functional team — including newsroom editors, product managers, data scientists, data analysts, and engineers — brought the momentum needed to advance our responsible use of algorithms. Today, nearly half of the home page is programmed with assistance from algorithms that help promote news, features, and sub-brand content, such as The Athletic and Wirecutter. Some of these modules, such as the features module located at the top right of the home page on the web version, are in highly visible locations. During major news moments, editors can also deploy algorithmic modules to display additional coverage to complement a main module of stories near the top of the page. (The topmost news package of Figure 1 is an example of this in action.)…(More)”

How is editorial judgment incorporated into algorithmic programming?

United Nations Global Principles for Information Integrity


United Nations: “Technological advances have revolutionized communications, connecting people on a previously unthinkable scale. They have supported communities in times of crisis, elevated marginalized voices and helped mobilize global movements for racial justice and gender equality.

Yet these same advances have enabled the spread of misinformation, disinformation and hate speech at an unprecedented volume, velocity and virality, risking the integrity of the information ecosystem.

New and escalating risks stemming from leaps in AI technologies have made strengthening information integrity one of the urgent tasks of our time.

This clear and present global threat demands coordinated international action.

The United Nations Global Principles for Information Integrity show us another future is possible…(More)”

Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality


Book by Renée DiResta: “…investigation into the way power and influence have been profoundly transformed reveals how a virtual rumor mill of niche propagandists increasingly shapes public opinion. While propagandists position themselves as trustworthy Davids, their reach, influence, and economics make them classic Goliaths—invisible rulers who create bespoke realities to revolutionize politics, culture, and society. Their work is driven by a simple maxim: if you make it trend, you make it true.
 
By revealing the machinery and dynamics of the interplay between influencers, algorithms, and online crowds, DiResta vividly illustrates the way propagandists deliberately undermine belief in the fundamental legitimacy of institutions that make society work. This alternate system for shaping public opinion, unexamined until now, is rewriting the relationship between the people and their government in profound ways. It has become a force so shockingly effective that its destructive power seems limitless. Scientific proof is powerless in front of it. Democratic validity is bulldozed by it. Leaders are humiliated by it. But they need not be.
 
With its deep insight into the power of propagandists to drive online crowds into battle—while bearing no responsibility for the consequences—Invisible Rulers not only predicts those consequences but offers ways for leaders to rapidly adapt and fight back…(More)”.