X (former Twitter) and Facebook downgrade journalism in posts
This is a growing trend on the two social platforms whose combined audiences reach almost 3.3 billion people worldwide (41% of the planet’s population). It shows that information is being intentionally degraded for the benefit of memes, gossip, facts and shocking or scandalous events.
A few days ago, Elon Musk, the owner of X, ordered the publication of headlines or headlines in posts to be eliminated to make more space for photos, videos and illustrations. The change received a hail of criticism, mostly from journalists, because it hides a deliberate effort by the platform to stifle the debate generated by journalistic news to benefit content produced by influencers and members of radical groups, such as the “hate offices” of extreme right sects.
The movement of network X occurs simultaneously with the release of data about an 80% drop on Facebook in the number of posts based on newspapers and magazines with journalistic content. According to data collected by the internet monitoring company Similarweb and published by the website Axios, the number of mentions of major international newspapers fell from 120 million in August 2020 to a mere 20 million last August (see graph below, reproduced from Axios).
The loss of space for news and debates on the main social platforms on the internet is a reaction to the movement of the largest press organizations in the United States, Canada, Europe and Australia, which began to charge social networks for the reproduction of journalistic material published originally in newspapers and television news programs. It is a struggle between the big techs, which also includes Google (YouTube), and the conventional press around the collection of copyrights. It is a dispute that involves millions of dollars, both for one side and the other, but the big losers are the 46% of Brazilians and 52% of North Americans who depend on social networks for news, according to the website Mediatalk.
The Garbage Intelligence Report bulletin, from August this year, shows that the loss of space of the main world newspapers on Facebook’s agenda is now occupied by news such as that of a woman formerly addicted to heavy drugs in her teens who reached the age of 55 sober, and the black American woman who turned 114 years old. Both stories were originally published in popular newspapers that do not charge Facebook.
The journalistic emptying of the daily agenda of large digital platforms happened quickly. Last June, the world’s press publications most referenced by Mark Zuckerberg’s network were the five most important North American newspapers. The journalistic news most mentioned by Facebook users in the month received 12 thousand shares, an exceptionally low rate compared to the period before the Covid 19 epidemic. Garbage Intelligence monitoring indicated that only one major publication was among the 10 most referenced by Facebook, both last August and September.
The logic of information degradation
The website Axios measured the decline in internet user access to the X and Facebook platforms in 123 countries surveyed. The biggest drop was on Facebook, which went from 42% of accesses measured in 2015 to 28% in 2023. In this same period, the only platforms that gained new users were TikTok and Instagram, both focused on posts with a minimum of text and a maximum number of images.
This all shows us a growing deterioration in the quality of the information provided to internet users, which generates immediate impacts on individual and collective behaviour. The press is already degraded by the crisis in its sustainability model, responsible for the closure of almost 60% of printed publications across the planet at the turn of the century. Now, social networks intensify the impoverishment of the public’s analytical and reflective capacity by disseminating superficial, decontextualized content without checking its reliability.
In this context, it is very difficult to identify the real meaning, relevance, accuracy and pertinence of what is offered to us as news. We are entering a kind of information vacuum, as stated by Swedish researchers Jutta Heidder and Olof Sundin, authors of a series of works pointing to the need for professionals to be concerned with what is behind the news, much more than with the description of facts, data and events. This is what both professors call the infrastructural production of meaning, a resource that would help combat the growth of misinformation in contemporary information ecosystems.
The growing trend towards “infotainment” (informative entertainment) and news superficiality both in the press and on digital platforms follows the logic of the search for financial sustainability at any price in the large public communication media. This indicates that we need urgently to rethink the values that guide the way we deal with information. Everything suggests that the most viable alternative seems to be a bottom-up approach, starting from local journalism, but this is a topic for another article.
