Ethan Zuckerman

Building a More Honest Internet

A new movement toward public service digital media may be what we need to counter the excesses and failures of today’s internet. A public service Web invites us to imagine services that don’t exist now, because they are not commercially viable, but perhaps should exist for our benefit, for the benefit of citizens in a democracy. Digital public service media would fill a black hole of misinformation with educational material and legitimate news.

Study: Breitbart-led right-wing media ecosystem altered broader media agenda

[Commentary] The 2016 Presidential Election shook the foundations of American politics. Media reports immediately looked for external disruption to explain the unanticipated victory—with theories ranging from Russian hacking to “fake news.” We have a less exotic, but perhaps more disconcerting explanation: Our own study of over 1.25 million stories published online between April 1, 2015 and Election Day shows that a right-wing media network anchored around Breitbart developed as a distinct and insulated media system, using social media as a backbone to transmit a hyper-partisan perspective to the world.

This pro-Trump media sphere appears to have not only successfully set the agenda for the conservative media sphere, but also strongly influenced the broader media agenda, in particular coverage of Hillary Clinton.

[Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, Hal Roberts, and Ethan Zuckerman are the authors. Benkler is a professor at Harvard Law School and co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard; Faris is research director at BKC; Roberts is a fellow at BKC and technical lead of Media Cloud; and Zuckerman is director of the MIT Center for Civic Media.]

The Internet's Original Sin

[Commentary] I have come to believe that advertising is the original sin of the web. An ad supported web has at least four downsides as a default business model.

First, while advertising without surveillance is possible, it’s hard to imagine online advertising without surveillance.

Second, not only does advertising lead to surveillance through the “investor storytime” mechanism, it creates incentives to produce and share content that generates pageviews and mouse clicks, but little thoughtful engagement.

Third, the advertising model tends to centralize the web. Advertisers are desperate to reach large audiences as the reach of any individual channel shrinks.

Finally, even attempts to mitigate advertising’s downsides have consequences. To compensate us for our experience of continual surveillance, many websites promise personalization of content to match our interests and tastes. By giving platforms information on our interests, we are, of course, generating more ad targeting information.

[Zuckerman is director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT and principal research scientist at MIT’s Media Lab]