Posts about journalism

There is no Trump without Murdoch

August 12, 2018 by Jeff Jarvis
, , , , ,

In the video above you will see New York Mayor Bill de Blasio trying to school CNN senior media correspondent Brian Stelter in the most important and most undercovered story in media today, a story that’s right under his nose: the ruinous impact of Fox News and Rupert Murdoch on American democracy. You’ll then see Stelter dismiss the critique in a fit of misplaced journalistic both-sideism.

Without Murdoch — without Fox News nationally and the New York Post locally — “we would be a more unified country,” de Blasio tells Stelter. “There would be less overt hate. There would be less appeal to racial division…. They put race front and center and they try to stir the most negative impulses in this country. There is no Donald Trump without News Corp.”

Stelter: “You’d rather not have Fox News or the New York Post exist?”

de Blasio: “I’m saying because they exist we’ve been changed for the worse.”

Stelter: “But isn’t that like saying they’re fake news or an enemy of the people?”

Jarvis: Sigh. No. He is criticizing Murdoch particularly. He’s not criticizing all of media. He’s not trying to send the public into battle against them. He’s not trying to kill them. He’s saying News Corp does a bad job. He’s saying they harm the nation. He’s right. Listen to him.

Stelter a little later: “Politicians make lousy media critics. Why do you feel it’s your role to be calling out a newspaper?”

de Blasio: “Because I think it’s not happening enough…. When it comes to News Corp., they have a political mission and we have to be able to talk about it.”

Stelter: “But singling out News Corp., it’s like Trump singling out CNN. Two wrongs don’t make a right.”

Jarvis: Scream. No, News Corp. is singular. That is the point de Blasio is trying to make as he compares them to CNN, the other networks, The New York Times, and The Washington Post: “One of these things is not like the others.” There is nothing like News Corp. in this country or in recent history. We’re not talking about that and we should be. When I say “we” I don’t just mean the nation, I specifically mean us in journalism and media and I very much mean media reporters and critics — that is de Blasio’s further critique. This is not a matter of balance, of symmetry, of two wrongs. The behavior of Fox News and of the right is asymmetrical. That is the key lesson of the election of 2016. If we do not start there, we are nowhere.

Now I’ll grant a few caveats: The rest of media are liberal and don’t admit it and that’s much of the reason they’re not trusted by half the nation. de Blasio also brings baggage when it comes to criticizing local media that criticize him. Because I teach at the City University of New York, I suppose I’m employee of the mayor’s. And I’ve been a fan of Stelter’s since he was in college. But I think Stelter is wrong to dismiss de Blasio’s critique because de Blasio is a politician, not a media critic. Indeed, we in media need to listen to voices other than our own.

de Blasio also brings caveats of his own. He supports the First Amendment. He supports free speech. He supports the press. He likes apple pie. (I’m guessing.) But that’s not good enough for Stelter, who accuses de Blasio of criticizing News Corp. because he wants to run for president. That is reportorial cynicism in action: ascribing cynicism to the motive of anyone you interview so you can seem to be tough on them rather than dealing with their critique and message at face value.

I imagine Stelter is frightened of criticizing Fox News directly because it is (a) a competitor and (b) conservative and we know that shit storm will rain from the right. So be it.

I will not mince words: Rupert Murdoch has single-handedly brought American democracy to ruin. Cable news — especially CNN — made its business on conflict and the rest of media built theirs on clickbait but only Fox News is built to — in de Blasio’s words — “sensationalize, racialize, and divide.” Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. are specifically to blame. How can any civilized soul, let alone a media correspondent, not have heard Laura Ingraham’s bilious racist rant last week and then demanded in all caps and bold: HOW THE FUCK IS THIS ON TELEVISION? WHO ALLOWS THIS? Murdoch does.

Media are fretting and kvetching about Twitter and Facebook enabling a few — yes, a few — crackpots to speak but it’s Fox News that has the bigger megaphone. It’s Murdoch that empowers Trump. It’s Fox News that instructs him on what to do, as we can see on Twitter every morning. Murdoch has far more impact than Infowars or any random asshole in your Twitter feed. de Blasio could not be more right: Rupert Murdoch made Donald Trump. He made it acceptable for the racism we saw in Washington this weekend to come out into the light. This is a damned big media story that media are not covering. So what if it takes a politician to bring attention to it? Credit Stelter for inviting de Blasio on after he gave a preview of his perspective to The Guardian. But arguing with him does not necessarily journalism make. Journalism is also listening, probing, exploring, understanding.

I go into class this week urging students to become media critics, to question what they see in journalism and why it is done that way. To prepare, I’m rereading The Elements of Journalism by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel. In it, they quote Murdoch when he won TV rights in Singapore:

Singapore is not liberal, but it’s clean and free of drug addicts. Not so long ago it was an impoverished, exploited colony with famines, diseases and other problems. Now people find themselves in three-room apartments with jobs and clean sheets. Material incentives create business and the free market economy. If politicians try it the other way around with democracy first, the Russian model is the result. Ninety percent of the Chinese are interested more in a better material life than in the right to vote.

“These words by a modern publisher advocating capitalism without democracy have no meaningful precedent in American journalism history,” Kovach said in a speech. He is talking about the man who is influencing at least a third of America. News Corp. is singular. That is why I have been arguing since before the election that the nation must invest in responsible, fact-based, journalistic media to compete with Fox News and provide an alternative. Until then, be worried. Be very worried. For as de Blasio warns, the local version of Fox News, Sinclair, came very near to taking over and brainwashing more local TV markets in the nation. This is not going to go away of its own accord, as if the nation one day wakes up from this nightmare, hits itself upside the head, and asks: “What were we thinking?” This is going to go away only through exposing what is happening. You’d think journalists would be the first to understand that.

Thank You, Craig

June 11, 2018 by Jeff Jarvis
, , , ,

I am proud that starting today, I am on the faculty of the newly rechristened Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. My friend Craig has given a generous gift to endow our J-school and we have named it in his honor. This represents an ideal alignment of missions — his and ours — in the service of trustworthy journalism in a public university.

I can’t remember exactly when I first met Craig. Like everyone I’ve ever witnessed meeting him, I was impressed to meet the Craig of craigslist. He is unique: a self-proclaimed nerd’s nerd, a model of humility, curiosity, goodwill, intelligence, humor, irony, and most of all generosity.

I love watching others puzzle over him. Many years ago at the rich and ritzy Foursquare business conference, I saw the CEO of a then-major media company throw up his arms in frustration at Craig’s refusal to clog his service with ads and maximize its revenue so he could sell out. “If I can’t interest you in a very large offer,” the exec asked, “can I interest you in a very small offer?”

Early in our school’s life, I invited Craig to speak to a room packed with our students, one of whom was as perplexed as that media executive. After Craig talked about supporting the philanthropic causes he cares so much about — trustworthy journalism and veterans among them — our admirably entrepreneurial student asked Craig why he would not maximize the value of the enterprise he founded, sell it for billions, and then donate the proceeds of the resulting endowment to the groups he wanted to support. Craig said that he saw himself a philanthropist of classified ads, leaving money in the pockets of untold real people in the market rather than in the pockets of the middlemen who controlled marketplaces for apartments, cars, jobs, pianos, whatever.

Yes, some have accused Craig of forestalling the business models of those middlemen: newspapers. I have always disagreed. Craig didn’t invent the internet. He created the most prominent example of what the internet could do in directly connecting buyers and sellers, reducing inefficiency in a market. Long ago, I argued to newspaper bosses that they would be displaced by their former customers — real estate agents, job agents, car dealers — who would use the net to go around them to bring their information directly to a more-perfect market. I was nearly beheaded as a heretic. But the moral of the story is clear: Craig Newmark and craigslist did not ruin newspapers or their business models but only showed them what the future would look like. So, no, Craig Newmark is not endowing our journalism school out of penance for what happened to newspapers. Craig Newmark is endowing our journalism school because — like us all — he is worried about the future of journalism, the fate of truth, and the health of the republic.

I never had the nerve to ask Craig for money. I never wanted to impose on my friendship with Craig. Instead, he generously invited me to ask. At another Foursquare conference — years after the one I recount above — he suggested I submit a proposal to him regarding trustworthy news. The result was the News Integrity Initiative, which enabled us to leverage Craig’s founding donation to raise more money from Facebook, the Ford Foundation, AppNexus, and others to support innovation in trustworthy news.

My dean and partner in innovation, Sarah Bartlett, was the one to suggest to Craig that he could make a profound impact on the future of our public journalism school. But I get ahead of myself. In February 2014, when Sarah was appointed dean, she asked me to schedule a tour of Silicon Valley — to Google, Facebook, Twitter, Medium, LinkedIn (during which we hatched a new degree in Social Journalism) — and I added a stop in Craig’s favorite boite in San Francisco’s Haight. Craig and Sarah hit it off. So now I fast-forward to a meeting around Sarah’s small conference table in her office when Craig said he planned to give away the money he earned to support the causes he cares so much about. I watched as Sarah presented the opportunities of our school. Craig’s ears perked up. The rest is our future.

Craig’s gift enables so much for our small, wonderful J-school. It assures our independence and our ability to create new degrees, to hire innovative faculty, to support new programs, to recruit diverse students, to do nothing less than reinvent journalism. The great thing about an endowment such as this is that it comes with no conditions but provides resources we and our successors can take advantage of for years go come: forever.

Craig Newmark and his wife Eileen are friends I enjoy seeing at journalism conferences from Perugia to the Presidio and as neighbors in New York, where they’re now spending much of their time. I am grateful for Craig’s friendship and support, advice and counsel, wisdom and vision. I am grateful beyond words for Craig’s support of the institution I so dearly love, now named the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism.

Thank you, friend. Thank you, Craig.

Thank you, Secretary Clinton

May 27, 2018 by Jeff Jarvis
, , ,

Friday at Radcliffe — in a tent wonderfully filled with 80 or 90 percent women, from the class of ’41 on— I had the privilege of seeing Hillary Clinton receive the Radcliffe Medal. I left ever-more impressed with her wisdom, experience, and civility — with her leadership — and, of course, ever-more depressed that what should be is not what is.

As a journalist and journalism teacher, I was grateful for her defense of my field in the face of the right’s attacks on it and in spite of its certain role in her defeat. “Defend the press,” Clinton urged. “And believe me, that’s not easy for me to say all the time. But I know well that in the absence of a free and vigorous press our democracy is not going to survive.” While the press itself is busy tying itself in knots debating whether to call a lie a lie (isn’t that our single most important job?) she did not mince truth: “It’s not just Fox, it’s now Sinclair. They are essentially delivering propaganda.… We need more outlets for reliable information.” [Disclosure: I donated to and volunteered for the Clinton campaign many weekends in Bethlehem, Pa.]

It is striking how Clinton manages to paint a picture of the nation that is more honest and accurate — and yet, surprisingly, more empathetic and hopeful — than I see painted by my colleagues in the news these days. I can do no better than to quote her admonition at length. Please listen:

Our country is dangerously polarized. We have sorted ourselves into opposing camps…. The divides on race and religion are starker than ever before and as the middle shrank, partisan animosity grew….

Now I don’t want to get political, but I want to say this is not just — just — a both-sides problem. The radicalization of American politics has not been symmetrical. There are forces — and leaders — in our country who blatantly incite people with hateful rhetoric, who stoke fear of change, who see the world in zero-sum terms so that if others are gaining then everyone else must be losing. That is a recipe for polarization and conflict.

I do believe that healing our country will take radical empathy, reaching across the divides of race, class, but mostly politics to try to see the world through the eyes of people very different from ourselves, and to try to return to rational debate, to find a way to disagree without being disagreeable, to recapture a sense of common humanity.

When we think about politics and judge our leaders, we can’t just ask: ‘Am I better off than I was four years ago?’ We should also ask: ‘Are we all better off? Are we as a country better, stronger, and fairer?’ And empathy should not only be at the center of our individual lives, our families, and our communities but at the center of our public life, our policies, and our politics. I know we don’t think of politics and empathy going hand-in-hand these days, but they can and they must.

As Madeleine [Albright] writes in her new book: This generosity of spirit, this caring about others and the proposition that we are all created equal is the single most effective antidote to the self-centered moral numbness that allows fascism to thrive….

Right now we are living through a crisis in our democracy. There certainly are not tanks in the street. But what’s happening goes to the heart of who we are as a nation. And I say this not as a Democrat who lost an election but as an American afraid of losing a country.

There are certain things that are so essential they must transcend politics. Waging a war on the rule of law and a free press, delegitimizing elections, perpetuating corruption, and rejecting the idea that our leaders should be public servants, undermining our national unity, and attacking truth and reason — these should alarm us all, whether we’re Republicans, Democrats, independents, vegetarians, whoever we might be.

And attempting to erase the line between fact and fiction, truth and an alternative reality, is a core feature of authoritarianism. The goal is to make us question logic and reason and sow mistrust, toward exactly the people I think we need to rely on: our leaders, the press, experts who seek to guide public policy based on evidence, ultimately ourselves.

So how do we build democratic resilience? It does begin with standing up for the truth, facts, and reason, not only in the classroom and on campus but every day in our lives. And it means speaking out about the vital role of higher education in our society to create opportunity and equity. It means calling out actual fake news when we see it and supporting brave journalism and reporting — and, yes, subscribing to a newspaper; remember those? Most of all, as obvious as it seems, it means voting….

And finally, that’s why I am so optimistic about the future, because of how unbelievably tough we are proving to be. I’ve encountered many people in recent months who give me hope: the students in Parkland, now the students in Santa Fe, many people in communities who have responded with courage and resolve…. And I find hope in the many women — and men — who are dismantling the notion that women should have to endure harassment and violence as a part of life….

So, yes, I know there are many fights to fight, and more seem to arise every day. And it will take work to keep up the pressure and to stay vigilant. We can neither close our eyes nor numb our hearts or throw up our hands and say, someone else take over from here.

But there has not been a time — certainly in fifty years, and maybe not even for longer than that — where our country depends on every citizen believing in the power of your actions, even when that power is invisible, and your efforts feel like you are in an uphill battle, and voting even when your side loses. It comes down to be a matter, really, of infinite faith. So pace ourselves. Lean on each other. Look for the good wherever we can. Celebrate the heroes. Encourage the children. Find ways to disagree respectfully. Be ready to lose some fights. But don’t quit. As John McCain recently reminded us, no just cause is futile, even if it’s lost. What matters is that we keep going.

I could not help feeling that she is leading a government in exile. Like de Gaulle issuing messages on the wireless, she had one for civil servants trapped in an uncivil administration: “I hope people in government who are not political appointees will stay as long as they can.” She is defending our nation against an attack from within: “It’s not been an easy time for more than half our country since the 2016 election. And I still think that understanding what happened in that weird and wild election will help us defend our democracy in the future.” Yes, Mr. Mueller, do your work.

What was striking in hearing about and watching Clinton was that it reminds us what it is like to have a human in politics. No matter how the press portrayed her, she’s charming and funny. She talked about her father forbidding her to attend Radcliffe on his dime because he’d heard it was filled with beatniks. She talked about trying to go incognito and how hard that is with Secret Service in tow: One night while Clinton was walking in Washington a woman on a bike stopped to whisper: “I have to tell you, there’s a man following you.”

I was also impressed with how she never shrinks from the toughest fight. Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey asked Clinton what company she’d want to head. She didn’t hesitate, even for a beat. “Facebook,” she replied. Why? “It is the biggest news platform in the world.” This is why I hope someday to be able to talk with her in front of our CUNY journalism students about her view of political coverage and how to fix it.

After her talk, given the chance — what the heck? — I joined the scrum of fans just to shake her hand and thank her. For what? For fighting for us.

Here’s video of the address I transcribed above:

And here is her discussion with Healey:

What’s Wrong With This Picture?

April 4, 2018 by Jeff Jarvis
, ,

Facebook is on its way to hiring 20,000 people to identify the hate and bile that we, the people, leave there because laws — Germany’s NetzDG, among others — and media demand it. Let me repeat that: 20,000 employees.

Now consider that the total number of daily newspaper journalists in America was 32,900 in 2015 and is probably below 30,000 today.

20,000 shit-pickers vs. 30,000 journalists.

What does that say about our priorities as a society? Yes, I know, I’m mixing a worldwide number (the 20,000 conversational janitors) with a U.S. number (journalists) but the scale is telling — not so much about Facebook or technology or business models but about us.

By these numbers, it is clear that we as a society are more concerned about policing playground twits who thereby get just what they want — attention — than about policing the truly powerful. How screwed up is that?

Now there are plenty of people who wish that Facebook would pay for journalists. Though I have argued that Facebook should hire journalists to bring a sense of public responsibility to the company, I do not believe Facebook, Google, or Twitter should build newsrooms to compete with news organizations. And, like many, I hope we find more ways for all the platforms to share more revenue and value with news companies to help pay for more journalism. If Facebook et al were not wasting so much money on the garbage crew, could it afford to be more generous to news? That depends on the value news brings to their users.

What can we do about this? Well, start here: Stop blaming everything we do on the platforms and expecting them to clean up our every mess. Maybe we, the users, should stop giving the trolls, twits, assholes, and Russians attention to rob them of their reasons to belch. Maybe we, the users, should ignore their crap (I have very little of it in my feed and I’ll bet that’s true for you, too) so we can see more resources devoted to watching the powerful. Maybe we, the users, should take more responsibility for reporting bad behavior — which will work only if the platforms, in turn, take the responsibility to listen to and act on what we say. Maybe media can recognize their role in polarizing society and valuing arguments over enlightenment. And, yes, the platforms should worry about the quality of conversation and information on their platforms. But can we also get them to pay attention to quality over crap? That is the real question I raise here.

Think of the problem this way: Every time some shithead spews hate, bigotry, lies, and idiocy, he (yes, I’m sure most are men) divert societal resources from positive impact to cleaning the sewers. Being too optimistic about the behavior of our fellow citizens is what got us — platforms, society, citizens — in this mess. But expecting and devoting resources to the worst behavior is little better.

We can all do better.

Perspective, please

March 20, 2018 by Jeff Jarvis
, ,

I’m going to straddle a sword by on the one hand criticizing the platforms for not taking their public responsibility seriously enough, and on the other hand pleading for some perspective before we descend into a moral panic with unintended consequences for the net and the future.

[Disclosure: I raised $14 million for the News Integrity Initiative at CUNY from Facebook, Craig Newmark, the Ford Foundation, AppNexus, and others. We are independent of Facebook and I personally receive no money from any platform.]

The Observer’s reporting on Cambridge Analytica’s exploitation of Facebook data on behalf of Donald Trump has raised what the Germans call a shitstorm. There are nuances to this story I’ll get to below. But to begin, suffice it to say that Facebook is in a mess. As much as the other platforms would like to hide behind their schadenfreude, they can’t. Google has plenty of problems with YouTube (I write this the night before Google is set to announce new mitzvahs to the news industry). And Twitter is wisely begging for help in counteracting the ill effects it now concedes it has had on the health of the public conversation.

The platforms need to realize that they are not trusted. (And before media wrap themselves up in their own blanket of schadenfreude, I will remind them that they are not trusted either.) The internet industry’s cockiness cannot stand. They must listen to and respect concerns about them. They must learn humility and admit how hard that will be for them. They need to perform harsh and honest self-examinations of their cultures and moral foundations. Underlying all this, I believe they must adopt an ethic of radical transparency.

For a few years, I’ve been arguing that Facebook and its fellows should hire journalists not just to build relationships with media companies but more importantly to embrace a sense of public responsibility in decisions about their products, ranking, experiments, and impact. Now they would do well to also hire ethicists, psychologists, philosophers, auditors, prosecutors, and the Pope himself to help them understand not how to present themselves to the world — that’s PR — but instead to fully comprehend the responsibility they hold for the internet, society, and the future.

I still believe that most people in these companies themselves believe that they are creating and harnessing technology for the good. What they have not groked is the greater responsibility that has fallen on them based on how their technologies are used. In the early days of the internet, the citizens of the net — myself included — and the platforms that served them valued openness über alles. And it was good. What we all failed to recognize was — on the good side — how much people would come to depend on these services for information and social interaction and — on the bad side — how much they would be manipulated at scale. “When we built Twitter,” Ev Williams said at South by Southwest, “we weren’t thinking about these things. We laid down fundamental architectures that had assumptions that didn’t account for bad behavior. And now we’re catching on to that.”

This means that the platforms must be more aware of that bad behavior and take surer steps to counteract it. They must make the judgments they feared making when they defended openness as a creed. I will contend again that this does not make them media companies; we do not want them to clean and polish our internet as if the platforms were magazines and the world were China. We also must recognize the difficulty that scale brings to the task. But they now have little choice but to define and defend quality on their platforms and in the wider circles of impact they have on society in at least these areas:

  • Civility of the public conversation. Technology companies need to set and enforce standards for basic, civilized behavior. I still want to err on the side of openness but I see no reason to condone harassment and threats, bigotry and hate speech, and lies as incitement. (By these considerations, Infowars, for example, should be toast.)
  • An informed public conversation. Whether they wanted it or not, Facebook and Twitter particularly — and Google, YouTube, Snap and others as well — became the key mechanisms by which the public informs itself. Here, too, I’ll err on the side of openness but the platforms need to set standards for quality and credibility and build paths that lead users to both. They cannot walk away from the news because it is messy and inconvenient for we depend upon them now.
  • A healthy public sphere. One could argue that Facebook, Twitter, et al are the victims of manipulation by Russia, Cambridge Analytica, trolls, the alt-right, and conspiracy theorists. Except that they are not the bad guys’ real targets. We are. The platforms have an obligation to detect, measure, reveal, and counteract this manipulation. For a definition of manipulation, I give you C. Wright Mills in The Power Elite: “Authority is power that is explicit and more or less ‘voluntarily’ obeyed; manipulation is the ‘secret’ exercise of power, unknown to those who are influenced.”

Those are broad categories regarding the platforms’ external responsibilities. Internally they need to examine the ethical and moral bases for their decisions about what they do with user data, about what kinds of behaviors they reward and exploit, about the impact of their (and mass media’s) volume-based business model in fostering clickbait, and so on.

If the internet companies do not get their ethical and public acts together and quickly — making it clear that they are capable of governing their behavior for the greater good — I fear that the growing moral panic overtaking discussion of technology will lead to harmful legislation and legal precedent, hampering the internet’s potential for us all. In the rush to regulation, I worry that we will end up with more bad law (like Germany’s NetzDG hate-speech law and Europe’s right-to-be-forgotten court ruling — each of which, paradoxically, fights the platforms’ power by giving them more power to censor speech). My greater fear is that the regulatory mechanisms installed for good governments will be used by bad ones — and these days, what country does not worry about bad government? — leading to a lowest common denominator of freedom on the net.

So now let me pose a few challenges to the platforms’ critics.

On the current Cambridge Analytica story, I’ll agree that Facebook is foolish to split hairs about the use of the word “breach” even if Facebook is right that it wasn’t one. But it behooves us all to get the story right. Please read the complete threads (by opening each tweet) from Jay Pinho and Patrick Ruffini:

Note well that Facebook created mechanisms to benefit all campaigns, including Barack Obama’s. At the time, this was generally thought to be a good: using a social platform to enable civic participation. What went wrong in the meantime was (1) a researcher broke Facebook’s rules and shared data intended for research with his own company and then with Cambridge Analytica and (2) Donald Trump.

So do you think that Facebook should be forbidden from helping political campaigns? If we want television and the unlimited money behind it to lose influence in our elections, shouldn’t we desire more mechanisms to directly, efficiently, and relevantly reach voters by candidates and movements? If you agree, then what should be the limits of that? Should Facebook choose good and bad candidates as we expect them to choose good and bad news? I could argue in favor of banning or not aiding, say, a racist, admitted sexual abuser who incites hatred with conspiracy theories and lies. But what if such a person becomes the candidate of one of two major parties and ultimately the victor? Was helping candidates good before Trump and bad afterwards?

Before arguing that Facebook should never share data with anyone, know that there are many researchers who are dying to get their hands on this data to better understand how information and disinformation spread and how society is changing. I was among many such researchers some weeks ago at a valuable event on disinformation at the University of Pennsylvania (where, by the way, most of the academics in attendance scoffed at the idea that Cambridge Analytica actually had a secret sauce and any great power to influence elections … but now’s not the time for that argument). So what are the standards you expect from Facebook et al when it comes to sharing data? To whom? For what purposes? With what protections and restrictions?

I worry that if we reach a strict data crackdown — no data ever shared or used without explicit permission for the exact purpose — we will cut off the key to the only sustainable future for journalism and media that I see: one built on a foundation of delivering relevant and valuable services to people as individuals and members of communities, no longer as an anonymous mass. So please be careful about the laws, precedents, and unintended consequences you set.

When criticizing the platforms — and yes, they deserve criticism — I would ask you to examine whether their sins are unique. The advertising model we now blame for all the bad behavior we see on the net originated with and is still in use by mass media. We in news invented clickbait; we just called it headlines. We in media also set in motion the polarization that plagues society today with our chronic desire to pit simplistic stereotypes of red v. blue in news stories and cable-news arguments. Mass media is to blame for the idea of the mass and its results.

When demanding more of the platforms — as we should — I also would urge us to ask more of ourselves, to recognize our responsibility as citizens in encouraging a civil and informed conversation. The platforms should define bad behavior and enable us to report it. Then we need to report it. Then they need to act on what we report. And given the scale of the task, we need to be realistic in our expectations: On any reasonably open platform, someone will game the system and shit will rise — we know that. The question is how quickly and effectively the platforms respond.

I’ll repeat what I said in a recent post: No one — not platforms, not ad agencies and networks, not brands, not media companies, not government, not users — can stand back and say that disinformation, hate, and incivility are someone else’s problem to solve. We all bear responsibility. We all must help by bringing pressure and demanding quality; by collaborating to define what quality is; by fixing systems that enable manipulation and exploitation; and by contributing whatever resources we have (ad dollars to links to reporting bad actors).

Finally, let’s please base our actions and our pressure on platforms and government on research, facts, and data. Is Facebook polarizing or depolarizing society? We do not know enough about how Facebook and Twitter affected our election and we would be wise to know more before we think we can prescribe treatments that could be worse then the disease. That’s not to say there isn’t plenty we know that Facebook, Google, Twitter, media, and society need to fix now. But treating technology companies as the agents of ill intent that maliciously ruin our elections and split us apart and addict us to our devices is simplistic and ultimately won’t get us to the real problems we all must address.

Today I talked about this with my friend and mentor Jay Rosen — who four years ago wrote this wise piece about the kind of legitimacy platforms rely upon. Jay said we really don’t have the terms and concepts we need for this discussion. I agree.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately about the idea of the mass and its reputed manipulation at the hands of powerful and bad actors at other key moments in history: the French and American revolutions; the Industrial Revolution; the advent of mass media. At each wendepunkt, scholars and commentators worried about the impact of the change and struggled to find the language to describe and understand it. Now, in the midst of the digital revolution, we worry and struggle again. Facebook, Google, Twitter, and many of the people who created the internet we use today have no way to fully understand what their machines really do. Neither do we. I, for example, preached the openness that became the architecture and religion of the platforms without understanding the inevitability of that openness breeding trolls. We cannot use our analogs of the past to explain this future. That can be frightening. But I will continue to argue — optimist to a fault — that we can figure this out together.