by Lucie Greene
But in this encroachment upon journalism, the Silicon Valley empires are also impeding one of the biggest and most important historic checks of power. One that checks on governments, and one that might have checked on them. One in which professional, fact-checked journalism now sits alongside unverified stories and user-generated content. These companies have become the mediators and curators of the news. The primary channels of the news. And, increasingly, the generators of the news.
The majority of Americans (62 percent) now get news from social media, including 18 percent who do so “often,” according to Pew Research Center. Meanwhile, consumers are cutting the cord from traditional media. Forty percent of millennials are choosing to rely solely on streaming services or the internet. This has democratized access to information, but also put the emphasis on algorithms to prioritize the information when we search for it, or the order within which we see top stories (often powered by how many clicks it has already received, how often it has piqued people’s interest, or just advertising). This kind of news, therefore, is dependent on populism and shock value.
Facebook’s audience size alone is the same as many media outlets combined. And yet, there’s an ongoing tension as this outsized influence collides violently with laissez-faire, automated, or crowd-sourced checks in place of the traditional responsibilities of its newspaper predecessors. It’s rapidly getting an audience that leapfrogs any newspaper or credible journalism outlet, but has none of the due diligence or policies of fact-checking that traditional organizations have. However, as horror stories emerge of live videos broadcasting real-life murders, there’s an emerging debate about power and its liability.
After a murder was live-streamed on Facebook’s video platform in 2017, Facebook blamed the three-hour time lapse in taking it down on users not alerting them to it sooner. Reputable publications such as The New York Times and The New Yorker still publish corrections even if a company name is misspelled. They are attached to the responsibility of journalism, to the discovery of truth and accuracy.
As media consumption becomes digital, the ability to create highly targeted digital advertising and positioning on platforms like Facebook and Google is packing a powerful punch. It’s one which is eroding revenues from traditional media. It’s been estimated that in 2016 Facebook absorbed more than $1 billion from the newspaper industry. As they get more influential still, will their own indiscretions hit the top of our newsfeeds?
There have been signs of pushback. In March 2016, brands including Walmart, General Motors, JPMorgan Chase, PepsiCo, Starbucks, and Johnson & Johnson pulled out of YouTube after their ads appeared alongside extremist hate-speech videos and unverified user-generated content, prompting the parent company to review its policy about controls over amateur video. Facebook has hired CNN anchor Campbell Brown to build better relations with news organizations in the wake of the fake news onslaught in 2016. And many have taken comfort in the rising sales of The New York Times in the early days of the Trump presidency, celebrating the reinvigoration of good reporting and journalistic values. CNN experienced its most-watched year in 2017 while launching a pro-“facts” campaign championing its journalistic rigor. Culturally, traditional journalism is experiencing a renaissance as iconic news-breaking moments are celebrated (see 2018’s The Post, starring Meryl Streep, which features The New York Times and Washington Post’s coverage of the Pentagon Papers, charting America’s involvement during the Vietnam War in the 1970s). The Times, Post, and New Yorker have also had record years, breaking stories on Russia’s connection to the U.S. election, and the Trump administration, as well as groundbreaking reports exposing the litany of sexual abuse accusations against Harvey Weinstein, Alabama politician Roy Moore, Vice Media, and others.
But all this is to try to rebel against a tsunami, one in which newspaper organizations are dying. Supporting the best ones, which are still staffed by trained, fact-checking journalists, and seasoned writers, has become positioned alongside the ACLU and other nonprofit organizations almost as a form of benevolence and social good. Not the profit-making business it once was.
Look forward five years, particularly as all media consumption goes digital, and it’s difficult to imagine any editorial brand reliant on advertising having a future. It belongs to Facebook, Apple, and Google. Stronger beloved publications will be saved by paid-for subscriptions, but in an era of ubiquitous free content, that will involve a brutal period of Darwinist competition and consolidation. Softer lifestyle categories of media, such as fashion and luxury titles that might have possessed a faint veil of authentic cultural journalism, have already become akin to branded content because of dwindling sales and advertising revenues, and a slow adjustment to the digital space. Or they have been replaced by social media “influencers.”
“Fake News,” the slogan, the movement, has impacted the credibility of the press. Meanwhile the collective misreading of U.S. election sentiment by respected newspapers has led many to question the continued relevance of journalism as we know it. In fairness, outlets such as The New York Times have tried to shake off their elitist, coast-ist progressive image. The wider wave of groundbreaking political stories led by traditional journalists has helped. Still, there have been times when this endeavor has drawn criticism, too. In the wake of the Charlottesville, Virginia, clash between tiki-torch-carrying white nationalists and anti-fascist activists, The New York Times sought to shed light on to the pro-Nazi sympathizer mindset by profiling white nationalist Tony Hovater. It was accused of gross insensitivity and of normalizing racism for presenting Hovater in too kind a light. National editor Marc Lacey wrote in a response: “We regret the degree to which the piece offended so many readers. We recognize that people can disagree on how best to tell a disagreeable story. What we think is indisputable, though, is the need to shed more light, not less, on the most extreme corners of American life and the people who inhabit them. That’s what the story, however imperfectly, tried to do.”
In a poll of 1,000 U.S. consumers conducted by J. Walter Thompson in January 2017, the majority of respondents felt that journalism will be less valuable ten years from now. Fifty-three percent said their perception of television has changed since the presidential election, 48 percent for social media platforms, and 45 percent for online sites. Of those whose opinion of sources has changed, most said it has changed for the worse. Specifically, 69 percent said their opinion of television has changed for the worse, 69 percent said this of social media platforms, and 66 percent said this of online sites.
This echoed Gallup’s 2016 poll, which showed trust in journalism at an all-time low. In 2017 it rebounded slightly, moving from 20 percent to 27 percent of people saying they trusted newspapers, but this is still far from the newspaper heyday in the 1980s and 1990s, when 37 percent of people trusted them.
What’s clear is that traditional journalism is being challenged, both symbolically and economically, by outside aggressors. It’s being positioned as untrustworthy, and irrelevant, while also having its audiences disintermediated (and monetized) by tech giants. But to lose journalism—journalism as we know it—is to lose a critical layer of consumer protection. We lose dialogue, contention, questioning, and investigation, and we end up with a simulated branded-content universe of unchecked influence and action. It could happen sooner than we think. Some believe it already has.
Silicon Valley and the Media
For all the claims of openness, Silicon Valley sees very little media scrutiny. This favorable treatment gets increasingly dangerous as its role becomes more all-encompassing, unchallenged, and amorphous. It’s ironic that while undermining the strength of traditional media organizations, coverage celebrating Silicon Valley in newspapers, TV, and magazines is still key in this group’s continued dominance as consumer brands and cultural influencers. It’s a central component in its relevance and connection to millennials, and in elevating its philosophy and personalities, and pivotal in amplifying Silicon Valley’s narrative. In
killing traditional media, it’s essentially killing one of the chief architects of its mythology.
After all, Silicon Valley doesn’t get beaten up by the media often. Many of these companies publish press updates on their websites, although they rarely need to engage in meaningful dialogue or external critique about their practices. Save for the enjoyably quippy irreverence of Recode or the more outspoken newspapers such as the Guardian and New York Times, many publications praise technology unceasingly. Critiques have ramped up recently in the wake of fears about Big Tech, European Union fines for tax evasion and privacy breaches, Amazon’s purported antitrust moves in acquiring Whole Foods (Target, Twitter next?). But this dissent sits within countless websites, print magazines, and bookshelves filled with books venerating tech. Even Vanity Fair, a magazine whose roots lie deep in Hollywood, has rapidly expanded its attention on the new celebrities, the techerati—from launching its Hive platform to hosting its New Establishment Summit in Los Angeles, with attendees including Shervin Pishevar and Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel.
The media historically has been soft on tech companies, and tech companies frequently circumvent the media and issue statements rather than have a dialogue with journalists, which runs squarely counter to their purported openness. “There’s a very strong veneration of the founder and the notion of change,” says Ravi Mattu, former tech, media, and telecoms editor at the Financial Times. “Think about Wired magazine, which ran a whole issue with Mark Zuckerberg on the cover, asking if Mark Zuckerberg is going to change the world . . . The American Dream becomes personified in the founder of a tech startup, and, fair enough, he’s done some amazing things. But the problem is, the construct is bad, because it means people don’t ask serious questions of this industry, the way they should do.” A more recent Wired magazine cover features a beaten-up Mark Zuckerberg following a year of scandal about its role in elections. But this sits within a bigger picture of countless covers, from Wired and other titles, celebrating white male tech founders.
Indeed. There’s an extremely powerful founder narrative, linked to the American Dream, which drives the sentiment that “who are we to critique these guys?” They have bootstrapped it to become extremely successful as entrepreneurs. Success is inherent to the American DNA; so is entrepreneurship. In the wake of the 2008 economic crisis, millennials faced career stagnation, little opportunity, and economic malaise. These founders, many of whom are millennial-age, have gone out on their own, built businesses, and triumphed despite these challenges. That’s an incredibly powerful message to receive—and the reason many millennials cite tech founders as their key influencers (as opposed to, say, celebrities). It also makes questioning them seem, at times, unnecessarily negative.
This bias can also be seen in the initial veneration of Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes. (For the uninitiated: The Palo Alto–based health tech company gained fame for attempting to develop blood tests that required only a few drops of blood and were conducted quickly using proprietary technology at a fraction of the cost of a professional lab. Holmes, only nineteen when the company was founded in 2003, became a celebrity of the tech circuit, attracting major funding, before it all collapsed when the Wall Street Journal revealed the company doctored its research.) Prior to these revelations, Holmes was presented as Steve Jobs reborn. “People weren’t asking basic questions about that stuff and Wired is emblematic of that,” Mattu continues. “Do tech publications really question enough of what’s going on in that world? I don’t think so. Fast Company is fun to read, but how much are they just puffing up the dream that we all want to believe in? I’m not talking about mass media and newspapers—the Wall Street Journal broke the story on Theranos. But, day-to-day, there’s not enough stopping and saying, ‘Hold on a sec.’ You see it in the way funding rounds are covered. Someone raises X amount of money and is valued at Y. All of a sudden it becomes a breathless story, not someone saying, ‘OK, this company just raised a massive amount of money, but it’s bullshit.’”
Access to Silicon Valley is strictly controlled, and there is a belief among tech figures that talking directly to audiences is better than being mediated by media (this they have in common with President Trump). But that again becomes a broadcast rather than a dialogue. Facebook now blasts announcements directly on its network. Product launches are tightly controlled. Rhetoric is wildly poetic and self-aggrandizing.
The growing impulse for founders to present themselves as thought leaders is worth noting. From publishing think pieces on Medium, to using Twitter to create followings, or launching popular podcasts and newsletters that chart the latest tech news and events—this is, in its own way, a one-way street, establishing their content and output as a form of media. Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has long understood the triangle of exposure, visibility, and startup value. It hosts annual summits for executives that feature its companies heavily. These enable a16z to support companies they are invested in yet control the conversation around them. Many tech media companies host events that are reliant upon tech execs taking part, further celebritizing tech founders, but also putting pressure on moderators not to ask tough questions. (Access to these highly private companies has become so difficult that their participation in a panel or discussion alone is enough of a feat for many high-profile events. Jargony, circular, political answers are often given to questions and rarely followed up on by interviewers, lest they burn bridges with the company.)
It’s a long walk from the 2010 movie The Social Network and its portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg as an unlikeable brat to Vanity Fair profiling this group as rock stars. “They have become celebrities as well as geeks who run companies. But they’re not geeks. They’re now part of the establishment,” observes Mattu.
Silicon Valley responds to criticism about its policies, its tactics, and its massive power by simply reiterating its own narrative louder and louder, framing critique as antagonistic to values such as freedom, access to the internet, and human rights. In response to threats of regulation, it claims the internet is “free” and should not be regulated. The message is about “connecting the world,” not the reality of “connecting the world in a commercialized space for financial gain by selling your information.” In response to calls for more responsibility, critics are called “luddites.”
“It’s so easy to label somebody who raises issues [or criticism under this mythology] as a luddite, or a critic, or a raging Communist,” jokes Julia Powles of the University of Cambridge, who specializes in the interface of law and technology. Powles is also one of the most outspoken opponents of Silicon Valley activity. “If you sat down with anybody—I speak about this stuff as much with people who are not experts as experts—everybody feels the same way,” she says, referring to Silicon Valley’s all-pervasiveness in our lives. “But then you do feel like you’re being a bit paranoid or a bit hypocritical, whatever sensation is needed to start to question it.”
One of Powles’s critiques is that companies like Google try to frame individual cases within bigger conceptual issues to win public debates. For instance, a case about someone removing outdated, damaging personal information from the internet becomes, in the media, framed as “anti–free speech” and the internet portrayed as an engine of truth. In this “right to be forgotten” case, it was a Spanish lawyer who—when his local newspaper digitized their archive—found that the top search result on his name was a reference to his house going into foreclosure several years prior. The result was defamatory, beyond his control, and no longer relevant. He made a reasonable request to take it down—he’d not given permission for this piece of information to live online forever. But the case spurred a wider debate, engineered by Google, about the right to have access to all information online, and the freedom of the press.
“Google benefited from keeping the debate in abstract terms, ensuring continued support from the media and the loudest members of the public, and provoking knee-jerk, often elliptical, and dehumanized reactions,” Powles wrote assess
ing the case in her 2015 paper “The Case That Won’t Be Forgotten.” In other words, rather than considering privacy cases individually, the discussion became a question of “Do you want free speech or not?”, which isn’t exactly the point. It’s not like this house listing was in the public interest. It’s not like it was even relevant to his abilities as a lawyer. It was about the level of unconscious information that is now accessible to the public due to search engines like Google and their ability to control what information is prioritized. In logistical terms, for Google, it might simply have been the issue that if they allowed this one case to become precedent, it would open up the need to create newly staffed teams to monitor this kind of case. Facebook has already been forced to hire teams of workers to monitor terrorism threats on its social platform. Much as Silicon Valley’s platforms and their success is predicated on algorithms to scale and create a massive impact, there are growing instances where, by the sheer magnitude of their audiences, they’re being held to account for their actions. If you are the world’s only search engine, it can ruin someone’s life if the only piece of information about them that comes up in a search is something from a troubled and now bygone period of economic hardship. Especially if they are not public figures. The commercial internet in this way is making us all public figures.
The mythology machine also helps Silicon Valley circumnavigate regulation. In creating a sense of exceptionalism to what they do, the internet becomes viewed as something special and alive that should not be constrained—at least not by government. This can be seen most patently in the debate surrounding net neutrality. In the U.S., before the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted to repeal it in 2017, net neutrality legislation introduced under Obama barred ISPs like Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon from paid prioritization or blocking internet traffic, allowing for free search for new businesses and startups. Without it, discovery of new brands, items, and websites becomes commercialized. Interestingly in this instance, Amazon, Facebook, Reddit, Netflix, and Microsoft through the Internet Association (IA) have historically supported keeping net neutrality rules—in part, perhaps, because without them, it gives too much power to the telecoms rather than them as gatekeepers to paid ad searchers.
