[LINK] The World Is Choking on Digital Pollution

[Craig Sanders]

On Tue, Jan 22, 2019 at 09:02:46AM +1100, Tom Worthington wrote:
> On 21/1/19 1:31 pm, Kim Holburn wrote:
>
> > > ... Society figured out how to manage the waste produced by the
> > > Industrial Revolution. We must do the same thing with the Internet
> > > today. ...
>
> Facebook is working as designed. It was not intended to provide a news
> service to the public, but to sell them stuff. It does this by showing you
> things you will like, based on past preferences and what your friends like.

Even selling stuff to their users is only a secondary objective at best for
facebook. The primary objective of facebook is to package up their users as
product and sell them.

that's been true for almost their entire history, since they expanded their
scope beyond just voyeuristic misogyny for american college fratboys.

Expanding their product line beyond just fratboys is probably why they did
that - they aren't the only valuable demographic available to be exploited.

> If you want a quality news service, that could be created. But who is going
> to pay for it? Keep in mind that whoever pays, gets to decide what is news,
> and what is not.

The ABC has always done a vastly superior job in reporting news than any of
the commercial channels, even in recent years with the constant bullying by
successive Liberal governments who want to turn it into their own Pravda.

Ditto for the BBC.

So, public funding of media is a good model...but it **MUST** be at
arms-length, without interference from the government of the day.

and without paying any attention to self-serving whinging from commercial
media lobbyists.

> For decades news was funded by advertising.

more accurately, "news sometimes managed to sneak in amongst the advertising,
sport and other soporific distractions, and sensationalism".  For commercial
TV & Radio, anyway. Some print papers did a good job.

craig

--
craig sanders <cas at taz.net.au>