News, Big Tech & Social Media
The collaborative team behind an untrustworthy "Initiative" aimed at keeping news consumers in the dark.
As we continue exploring how propaganda makes its way into news, I want to tell you about an interesting project called The Trusted News Initiative. It shines a pretty nice light on how closely social media and Big Tech have begun working with traditional news outlets to shape narratives and ultimately decide what information you, as consumers, are permitted to know.
Like so much else involving the media these days, “The Trusted News Initiative” sounds harmless enough. But is it?
This week, I did some digging; here’s what I found out:
WHO STARTED IT?
This “Initiative” came about after the BBC hosted a “Trusted News Summit” in September, 2019. The organizations attending the “Summit” included:
The European Broadcasting Union (EBU),
Facebook,
Financial Times,
First Draft,
Google,
The Hindu, and
The Wall Street Journal
“Other partners,” the BBC says in this article describing the event, “are AFP (Agence France-Presse), CBC/Radio-Canada, Microsoft, Reuters, and The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, and we are also consulting Twitter on areas of potential collaboration.”
WHAT WAS THE GROUP’S INITIAL GOAL?
The stated goal of the group (excerpted from the BBC article, above) is fighting “disinformation and so-called fake news,” which the head of the BBC calls “a threat to us all.”
WHAT WAS THE GROUP’S RESOLUTION AFTER ITS FIRST MEETING?
(also excerpted from the BBC article, above)
“Initiatives include:
Early Warning System: creating a system so organisations can alert each other rapidly when they discover disinformation which threatens human life or disrupts democracy during elections. The emphasis will be on moving quickly and collectively to undermine disinformation before it can take hold.
Media Education: a joint online media education campaign to support and promote media education messages
Voter Information: co-operation on civic information around elections, so there is a common way to explain how and where to vote
Shared learning: particularly around high-profile elections
Everyone involved is committed to ensuring the collaboration is a success. That means it must work in practice as well as in theory. To ensure the approach works and is fast and responsive, we will be conducting “fire drill” tests before we roll out the agreed actions.”
Wow.
I 100% agree that we don’t want bad intel circulating out there in the world. But am I the only one who thinks these initiatives (“early warning system,” “media education” and “shared learning” in particular) sound a little more like vehicles of war and indoctrination than journalistic practices? And who, exactly, gets to decide what constitutes “disinformation?” Is there some pre-set list of standards that all journalists worldwide have agreed on? Or is “disinformation” any information that “Summit” attendees (including non-news companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Twitter) don’t like?
What’s even more interesting, though, is seeing how the group - which, remember, is a combination of news outlets, social media outlets and big tech corporations (all groups with a massive hold on news consumers’ abilities to see and share news content) - evolved over time. The next “news story” I read about the project was this one, again published by the BBC, titled: “Trusted News Initiative (TNI) steps up global fight against disinformation with new focus on US presidential election.”
It’s a pretty fascinating piece detailing exactly how these major tech, news and social media companies worked in tandem to regulate, control and sometimes even suppress the flow of information surrounding the 2020 US Presidential election (*again… am I the only one who finds it surreal that they are telling news consumers this stuff out loud?! By the way, the group also takes credit for doing the same in elections in the UK, Myanmar and Taiwan (!) )
But I also found a couple of fascinating changes to the rules of the group in this story:
The group’s new stated goal is now just a little bit different than it was originally: “The Trusted News Initiative (TNI) was set up last year to protect audiences and users from disinformation, particularly around moments of jeopardy, such as elections. The TNI complements existing programmes partners have in place.”
Interesting. Since when are elections “moments of jeopardy?”
There were four new, additional “partners” on the project in this second article:
The Associated Press
The Washington Post
You Tube
(Twitter was also officially named as a partner)
[[*So just to recap, now we’ve got both the AP AND Reuters in on the “Initiative” (read my piece here about how those two news wire services feed the vast majority of newsrooms in the nation) plus the WSJ, the New York Times (you’ll see this below), Google, Microsoft, You Tube, Facebook and Twitter. That’s a pretty solid stronghold on information providers here in the U.S.]]
There was a new “verification technology” initiative added to their to-do list as well - the implementation of something called “Project Origin,” which will be “led by a coalition of the BBC, CBC / radio-Canada, Microsoft and The New York Times.” Basically, the new project’s goal is to attach “a digital watermark to media originating from an authentic content creator, a watermark that degrades when content has been manipulated.”
*Your guess is as good as mine as to what an “authentic content creator” actually is… or what constitutes “manipulated” content. Though I’m guessing this particular group’s members would all happily qualify themselves as “authentic content creators,” and their competitors as peddlers of “manipulated” content…
Interestingly, as time went on, the group evolved even more. In this December 2020 “news article” about the project – “Trusted News Initiative (TNI) to combat spread of harmful vaccine disinformation and announces major research project” - the BBC announced that the group (again - remember - this group includes major, large non-news organizations like Microsoft, Google, You Tube Twitter and Facebook) has now turned its attentions to regulating / controlling / suppressing the free flow of information about the Covid-19 vaccine. The “major research project” they are all undertaking together is particularly interesting; here’s a summary from the BBC piece:
“The year-long research programme will use innovative research design, fielding multiple surveys in India, Brazil and the UK. It will examine the labelling and correcting of news content by fact checkers and, for example, how displaying brands more prominently affects people’s engagement with news providers. The research will examine how exposure to quality news and news about misinformation in mainstream media sources affects the spread of misinformation, and will be supported by partners within the TNI.
The ambition is to use the findings from this research to inform future media education campaigns…”
There’s a lot I can say about this one.
It’s kind of creepy that they’re doing “research” on us and our news without telling us in the news (and tech, and social media) outlets themselves…
This “research” experiment helps explains why, on a planet with nearly 200 countries, so many corporate media outlets have been hyper-focused recently on vaccination rates in just three: (you guessed it!) India, Brazil and the UK.
Why, constantly, do people in media keep insisting that it’s their job to decide what information we should and shouldn’t read? A true journalist’s only job is to present the facts to consumers so they can make decisions for themselves.
But the main takeaway from this can be found in that last line. Safe to say, a “media education campaign” is not the same thing as journalism (ie: telling all sides of a story so news consumers can make up their own minds). In fact, a “media education campaign” sounds a whole lot more to me more like propaganda.
But what do I know?
FOOD FOR THOUGHT:
There is no website for the “Trusted News Initiative” - no “about” page, no page listing all of the people or organizations who are affiliated with it. And almost no one in media has written about the organization either - not the Wall Street Journal or CNN or MSNBC or Fox or the Washington Post. Pretty much the only place I have been able to find information about the “Trusted News Initiative” has been in articles published on the BBC website. Why is that weird? Because the BBC is the founder of the “Trusted News Initiative.” So, essentially, they are controlling the flow of information about themselves. That is not reporting OR journalism. That’s PR on a good day and propaganda every time else.
Playing devil’s advocate here, you could give the BBC kudos for being open about their involvement in such a controversial project. But speaking from a journalist’s perspective, it’s a REALLY BAD IDEA to write articles about yourself (and your own special projects) if you want to be considered a credible news organization. Again, just to hammer the point home once more, when you write articles about yourself boasting about how you collude with others to control the flow of news, you are no longer practicing journalism. You are creating propaganda.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT #2
So, quick refresher on how the “Fourth Estate” is supposed to work here in the U.S. – remember, as noted in previous posts, the “press” is supposed to be independent of the government or any other organizations so reporters can freely investigate and report on anything they want.
The thing not many people think about – but which is equally crucial to the press helping maintain a free and fair society – is the fact that news outlets should all be independent of one another. If they start “collaborating,” or “sharing” information as the “Initiative’s” participants agreed to do, they start working together as one giant organization instead of several independent outlets. Throw in some social media and Big Tech “helpers",” and suddenly you have a group not unlike 1984’s massive, ominous and monolithic “Ministry of Truth” (which, ironically, busies itself with creating ever-changing content to control and confuse the consumers who they allegedly “inform”).
When news outlets start working as one instead of many, they stop doing their collective jobs, which includes both fostering natural competition amongst each other and fostering curiosity and debate amongst news consumers. Most crucially, they also stop presenting Americans with differing / alternate angles on important news stories.
In other words, if all of the news organizations in the whole country – or the whole world, per the “Trusted News Initiative” project’s ambitions - start banding together (with the help of Big Tech and social media), to present only pre-approved versions of crucial stories, then we, the consumers, lose out on diversity of thought and opinion and we become uneducated pawns in the media’s bizarre game of information control. In short, we learn only what they want us to learn. Nothing more, nothing less.