Thread · 5 tweets · 15 Nov 2020

I don't know for sure, just some ideas! And I'd love to hear other ideas too. There's the usual bunch. One is more funding so that local journalism can exist again. It's harder to distrust your neighbourly reporter.

Policing the digital ad market so that Google stops cheating. The header bidder natural experiment indicates that that could bring 30-100% more money to newspapers. Then some better funding models, eg. Scroll.

Less usual, I think we need to think about how news is presented. With aggregation, everything looks uniform: you get a big blob of results that all look like they're talking about the same thing (because search). The "MSM" looks like a real entity.

I think this would warrant some user studies to see what the effect of aggregation on trust and the perception of news is There's also work on depolarisation that I'd like to look into. I think some could be used by news products.

Finally, we need to sort out Facebook and YouTube. With them, or against them. They rooted out radical Islamic terrorism (and porn), they could root out white supremacy, antivax, etc. that kill far more.