Mark Thompson complains about this new social media stuff.
Facebook should consider completely removing news from users’ feeds unless it can find a way to avoid low-quality stories clogging up the site, the chief executive of the New York Times has said.
Mark Thompson said he was “terrified” by Facebook’s attempts to use algorithms to rank the quality of news outlets, warning that “a machine entirely behind closed doors is going to rank the world’s news sources” and that publications would be ranked at the top only for as long as they remained “in the good books of Facebook”.
“All of that sounds like a controlled society,” said Thompson, a former director general of the BBC. “The first thing I think they can do is work with us to help users make decisions about who to trust and who not to trust. I don’t want a special pass saying we’re going to be trusted more than others. I want to win people’s trust by people understanding what we’re trying to do.
Thing is, I don’t trust you. The legacy media lies and manipulates. Take, for example the use of populism used repeatedly by the media to describe a form of democracy that they don’t like. Then there’s the use of far right – and the time one man raising his hand at a march was reported as the marchers giving Nazi salutes. This was blatant manipulation of the story to the point where the truth was so deeply buried it was impossible to discern. This was deliberate and as a consequence, I do not trust them.
I have very little time for Facebook, but the use of social media has allowed people to spread information and bypass the gatekeepers of the legacy media and they really, really don’t like it.
Well, tough. Suck it up. If Facebook enables people to dig around for themselves, then it is doing some good. Anything that allows us to get another angle to fact-check the lies and distortions of the press is a good thing.
Mark Thompson is shroud waving here and, frankly, my sympathy is non-existent. They have brought this upon themselves. Wither away and die. Sooner rather than later. We don’t need you and we don’t respect you, as you are the purveyors of propaganda, lies and distortion. You are a canker upon the body politic. Go now. Be off with you.
What’s he got to whinge about?
He was the problem, and now he just has to sit back and pontificate.
Never trust anyone in the BBC nowadays. They’re a worthless crowd who lie and cheat and are probably the worst broadcaster in the world.
As Corporal Jones said “They don’t like it up them”
In UK, BBC needs severe pollarding – 1 BBC TV & 1 BBC Radio
No “special pass?” Really? It would be interesting to see what their take on a “special pass” would be if Facebook decided to ban BBC stories for being “too biased” or for putting out “fake news” or stories which hadn’t been properly researched from both sides (which is most of them, these days). I bet they won’t, though – Facebook are as conformist and terrified of alternative opinions about anything as the BBC are!
BBC review from Canada:
Sandwich Shortage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbCyoG9WpdY
I am amused by the way that the old media try to represent themselves as being a trustworthy source of reliable information while claiming that the internet can’t be trusted. The internet allows immediate cross checking of stories wherever they come from, this is why the old media have come unstuck. There was a time when we had no way of knowing whether we were being lied to, although we always had our suspicions. Now that we can check up on them , we find that they are lying most of the time.
Mark Thompson has never actually accepted a version of the world where the news can be disseminated via means other than the BBC News. It’s like (for him) the world stopped rotating in 1971