94 Zombie Media
democratic process, but also gave overt support to European separatists and pro-Russian factions.
57
In such circumstances, Russian propagandists faced a system of automated, algorithmic gatekeepers which
were increasingly replacing human editors and journalists: as such, the
communications network of the United States of America proved itself
incredibly easy to infiltrate.
The crisis represented by fake news during 2016 and 2017 was particularly poignant because, as the former Director of the FBI, James
Comey, confirmed in a response to questions from Senator Martin Heinrich during his testimony to Congress in May 2017, it in part stemmed
from “a hostile act by the Russian government” against the USA.
58
The
intervention of Russian hackers, however, represented only symptom of
the transformation of the media landscape that has taken place in the
first two decades of the twenty-first century. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the disruption of the distribution and economics of older
media monopolies by big tech has led to a rush to gain new readers,
with one effect being a polarisation of audiences who tend to respond
to “vivid” rather than “pallid” news: one consequence of this is a push
towards more partisan language which, in turn, influences political divisions and helps to break down a sense of shared culture. Alongside
the physical remediation of news away from print and broadcast into
digital formats, social media has had a crucial role to play in the establishment of new forms of gatekeeping, ones where automated algorithms
fulfil the functions once undertaken by human editors. The fact that this
clearly resulted in a system error does not, by any means, mark the end
of this transformation: by the end of 2016, for example, Facebook was
handling 300 petabytes of data on its servers (or the equivalent of about
120 billion smartphone photos). The transition from small, centralised
production by professional publishers to huge amounts of user-generated
content in the form of digital shares and posts on social media represents
a system that has scaled far beyond traditional forms of human gatekeeping. For the immediate future, it is clear that the algorithms of truth
are not yet able to prevent zombie media overrunning its users. In the
next decade, however, we will almost certainly witness step changes in
automation that will see robot editors fulfilling much more efficiently a
task that we once considered all-too-human.
Notes
1 ‘Final Election 2016 Numbers’, 70News, Posted on November 12, Updated
on November 13, 2016, https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20161114005316/
trump-won-both-popular-62-9-m-62-7-m-and-electoral-college-vote-306232-hey-change-org-scrap-your-loony-petition-now.
2 Philip Bump, “Google’s Top News Link for ‘Final Election Results’ Goes to
a Fake News Site with False Numbers”, The Washington Post, November
democratic process, but also gave overt support to European separatists and pro-Russian factions.
57
In such circumstances, Russian propagandists faced a system of automated, algorithmic gatekeepers which
were increasingly replacing human editors and journalists: as such, the
communications network of the United States of America proved itself
incredibly easy to infiltrate.
The crisis represented by fake news during 2016 and 2017 was particularly poignant because, as the former Director of the FBI, James
Comey, confirmed in a response to questions from Senator Martin Heinrich during his testimony to Congress in May 2017, it in part stemmed
from “a hostile act by the Russian government” against the USA.
58
The
intervention of Russian hackers, however, represented only symptom of
the transformation of the media landscape that has taken place in the
first two decades of the twenty-first century. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the disruption of the distribution and economics of older
media monopolies by big tech has led to a rush to gain new readers,
with one effect being a polarisation of audiences who tend to respond
to “vivid” rather than “pallid” news: one consequence of this is a push
towards more partisan language which, in turn, influences political divisions and helps to break down a sense of shared culture. Alongside
the physical remediation of news away from print and broadcast into
digital formats, social media has had a crucial role to play in the establishment of new forms of gatekeeping, ones where automated algorithms
fulfil the functions once undertaken by human editors. The fact that this
clearly resulted in a system error does not, by any means, mark the end
of this transformation: by the end of 2016, for example, Facebook was
handling 300 petabytes of data on its servers (or the equivalent of about
120 billion smartphone photos). The transition from small, centralised
production by professional publishers to huge amounts of user-generated
content in the form of digital shares and posts on social media represents
a system that has scaled far beyond traditional forms of human gatekeeping. For the immediate future, it is clear that the algorithms of truth
are not yet able to prevent zombie media overrunning its users. In the
next decade, however, we will almost certainly witness step changes in
automation that will see robot editors fulfilling much more efficiently a
task that we once considered all-too-human.
Notes
1 ‘Final Election 2016 Numbers’, 70News, Posted on November 12, Updated
on November 13, 2016, https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20161114005316/
trump-won-both-popular-62-9-m-62-7-m-and-electoral-college-vote-306232-hey-change-org-scrap-your-loony-petition-now.
2 Philip Bump, “Google’s Top News Link for ‘Final Election Results’ Goes to
a Fake News Site with False Numbers”, The Washington Post, November