The Failed Promise of Digital Content: a recap, part 4

We were promised exhaustive libraries of digital content available anytime and anywhere, but those promises have come up short.
Since May 2009, I have written about the shortcomings of the internet and digital media when it comes to content – music, video, archived information, etc.
Here is an index of parts 51 to 60 of the series “The Failed Promise of Digital Content.”

Part 51: Ad avoidance trend threatens news media, TV industries
Part 52: Link rot, a problem with no end in sight
Part 53: The Failed Promise of Digital Content: A roundup of concerns
Part 54: Yahoo Finance redesign getting terrible reviews, called ‘New Coke of the Internet’
Part 55: Hey, Yahoo, fix your glitchy websites
Part 56: Disappearing websites: No permanence on the web
Part 57: Facebook and the fake news problem
Part 58: Lying clickbait part of fake news trend
Part 59: Combatting fake news, conspiracy theories and hate speech through terms of service
Part 60: Add fake videos to the list of fake things online

Photos: Memes mocking fake information online.

Add fake videos to the list of fake things online

It’s been said for years that you can’t always trust what you read and see on the internet. What had been limited to Wikipedia vandalism and prank viral emails has spread across the web. Now we’re getting fake news presented as authentic on social media platforms.
While attention has been focused lately on fake news, let’s not ignore the problem of fabricated videos presented as fact on YouTube and elsewhere.
Some fake videos were done as experiments into what makes something go viral online. That includes Jimmy Kimmel’s video of a woman falling on a glass table and catching fire while twerking.
It also includes an Australian company that uploaded videos of hunters getting attacked by a lion and a snowboarder being chased by a bear.
But fake videos are everywhere on YouTube. They include makers of so-called “social experiments” like Joey Salads, who was busted for a fake video of black men vandalizing a car with Donald Trump campaign stickers. (See article by Mediaite.)
Fake videos online are proliferating because they generate views, which leads to advertising revenue. This has led to staged social experiments and other faked videos. (See articles by Mic and the Daily Dot.)
Other offenders include YouTube videos that mislead viewers about their content for clicks.
YouTube and similar platforms need to do a better job of policing these videos and make sure they are properly labeled as spoofs, satire or fictionalization. Otherwise the situation will get out of hand.

Photo: Screenshot of the Joey Salads prank video about the Donald Trump car.

Combatting fake news, conspiracy theories and hate speech through terms of service

The solution to the proliferation of fake news, conspiracy theories and hate speech littering social media can be found in the terms of service agreements those platforms use.
People using Facebook, Twitter and other social media can’t claim to have free speech protections on those commercial services. They are subject to the terms of service that they agreed to when they signed up and whenever those terms are updated.
The First Amendment only protects citizens from censorship by the government, not commercial services. To be on those services you have to agree to their rules.
If social media cracked down on hate speech, conspiracy theories and fake news half as hard as some enforce copyright restrictions, there wouldn’t be a problem.
Social media services should allow users to flag content they believe violates their terms of service. They can remove that content and warn people who maliciously spread alarming content that they can be kicked off the service.
Social media services should have a fair appeals process for those who believe they were wrongfully censored or terminated.
Until now, social media services have been pretty lenient about what is shared on their platforms. They wanted as many users and as much activity as possible to drive advertising revenue.
But the rise of alarming content on those services has made them less inviting places to be, so it makes good business sense to pivot.

Photo: Graphic from Snopes.com article titled “Snopes’ Field Guide to Fake News Sites and Hoax Purveyors.”

Facebook and the fake news problem

Facebook took a lot of flak for distributing false viral stories during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, many of which were attacks on Democratic frontrunner and eventual loser Hillary Clinton.
It’s a stretch to say that fake news on Facebook helped elect Donald Trump, but the problem clearly damaged Facebook’s reputation.
President Barack Obama said the fake news circulating on Facebook has created “a dust cloud of nonsense.”
Facebook is under no legal obligation to fix its problem with fake news being distributed on its social network. But it makes good business sense to do something about it.
More than 40% of U.S. adults turn to Facebook for news.
In August, Facebook fired the editors behind Trending News amid concerns that they were blocking conservative news. Two days later, a fake story about Fox News firing Megyn Kelly was featured in its Trending News section.
In the weeks that followed, Facebook spotlighted many fake news stories in its Trending News section, the Washington Post reported.
Facebook replaced its human editors with a computer algorithm that surfaces trending stories based on shares and likes.
In the last three months of the campaign, the top-performing fake election news stories on Facebook generated more engagement than the top stories from major news outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, NBC News and others, BuzzFeed News reported.
(Here’s a collection of fake news from the presidential race that went viral on Facebook, according to Business Insider.)
Some media watchdogs have put together lists of fake, false or regularly misleading websites.
A list by Melissa Zimdars, a media professor at Merrimack College in Massachusetts, also included parody sites like the Onion, because some people believe their satirical stories are true. (See Literally Unbelievable.) The Zimdars list was criticized for taking an overly broad interpretation of fake news to include “False, Misleading, Clickbait-y, and/or Satirical ‘News’ Sources.”
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has vowed to make changes to prevent misinformation from being distributed on Facebook. Those changes include stronger detection and easy reporting of fake news and disrupting the economics of fake news.
Media critic Jeff Jarvis and tech entrepreneur John Borthwick offered their own suggestions in a blog post.
Veteran tech reporter Walt Mossberg also offered some suggestions in a blog post.
Zuckerberg is correct when he says the problem of fake news is “complex, both technically and philosophically.”
Efforts to crack down on fake news websites, which exist to wreak havoc and generate ad revenue, should not harm parody sites or sites with opinions that others disagree with.

Photo from parody site Clickhole.

Lying clickbait: Pretty ladies edition

Lots of lying clickbait articles use photos of pretty ladies to get men to click on sponsored links. It’s a honeypot and the photos are a ruse.
Here are some recent examples.
A Taboola-sponsored link titled “Old camera dug up near a WWII battlefield in Europe shows us a different side of the war” uses a photo of a fetching young lady in uniform.
Everything in that headline is wrong. The photo is one of a series of pictures taken by David Woolley. They’re certainly not historical.

A sponsored post from Outbrain titled “12 mysterious photos that cannot be explained” features a photo of a buxom blonde. The photo is actually very easy to explain: It’s a picture of late Playboy bunny and actress Dorothy Stratten.

A promoted link by Taboola advertised “50 rarely seen historical photos that will leave you speechless.” It features a photo of actress Goldie Hawn taken by Robert Erdmann. This photo is hardly rarely seen. It’s prominently featured on Erdmann’s own website.

A Taboola link headlined “Long-lost mobster photos that will make your skin crawl” features a man embracing a pretty young woman on the beach.
The photo was apparently taken in the late 1940s or early 1950s in San Diego. The grandson of the man in the picture posted it to Reddit. No mob connection.

Yet another clickbait article on Yahoo Finance promised “Long lost mob photos that are hideous.” What is it with lying clickbait articles about mobsters, circus freaks and old cameras found with undeveloped photos in them?
Anyway, this article uses a photo that isn’t old or mob-related. It was taken in 2015 backstage at a lingerie fashion show by Secrets in Lace. (See article and photos by Un-covered.)

Many sponsored links about new rules and regulations are customized to the town you live in. But they often feature photos of bikini-clad women not taken anywhere near you.
Here are two examples.
I can’t identify where the photo of the two handcuffed girls in the back of a police squad car was taken. But it certainly wasn’t Great Falls, Va.

A photo of a pretty black girl in handcuffs was taken in May 2013 in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. (See articles by the New York Daily News and the Daily Mail.) It definitely was not taken in Great Falls, Va., or Portsmouth, N.H.

Lying clickbait part of fake news trend

The issue of fake news being disseminated on Facebook and elsewhere online has been a major topic of conversation since the Nov. 8 election of Donald Trump as president.
But false information online is nothing new.
For example, Snopes.com was created in 1995 as a resource to validate or debunk items being circulated through viral email, internet rumors and other means.
Now people are creating fake news websites that use clickbait headlines on social media to drive online traffic and generate advertising revenue.
Similar to this, content distribution services like Taboola, Revcontent and Outbrain often use deceptive photos and headlines with sponsored links. I’ve been documenting this fraudulent activity for some time.
Here are some more recent examples.
Taboola recently shared a sponsored link to an article titled “The worst people to have ever walked our Earth.” It featured a photo of a menacing man in a fascist military uniform.
But the photo is of late actor Raul Julia portraying a villain in the movie “Street Fighter” (1994), not a real character.

Another article titled “A 72-year-old woman can’t believe her 4-day transformation.” It used a photo of supermodel Heidi Klum when she wore makeup to portray an old lady for Halloween in 2013. (Hat tip to Ella ‏@ellagb1675 on Twitter.)

In my reporting on lying clickbait, I’ve come across many examples of content promotion services trying to pass off movie stills as non-fiction.
Here are a few examples.
Taboola sponsored a link to an article titled “Vintage circus freaks that will give you nightmares.” The promoted article includes a photo of actress Olga Baclanova in makeup as a character from the 1932 horror movie “Freaks.”

Another Taboola sponsored link, possibly to the same article, was titled “70 outrageous circus freaks from the past.” It used digital artwork by Jeffery Scott called “A Modern Day Sagittarian.”

An article titled “Camera found in iceberg that sank the Titanic with film still inside” used a photo from the 1997 movie “Titanic.” A similar article used a photo from the 1943 movie “Titanic.”

Here are a few more examples that I’ve previously noted.
“Goodbye Melissa – You will be missed” implies that actress Melissa McCarthy is dead. She’s not.

The article titled “The longest celebrity marriages of all time” uses a photo of actors Christopher Walken and Natalie Wood from the movie “Brainstorm” (1983). The two were never married in real life.

And the article titled “After losing 200 lbs. Rebel Wilson is actually gorgeous!” uses a Photoshopped picture of Wilson. She never lost that kind of weight.

Google Plus Collections: An interesting pivot

Google’s attempt to copy Facebook with Google Plus wasn’t successful. But its recent shift to make Google Plus an aggregation service is a smart one.
With Google Plus Collections, anyone can easily create a specialized online site devoted to their passions and share them with the world. Users can create collections of weblinks, photos and other media around topics like travel, nature, technology and pop culture.
Google Plus Collections satisfies a need people have to aggregate and collect things of interest in one place. It’s the same need that has driven Pinterest.
Google Plus needs a better way to explore its collections, perhaps by categorizing them for easier perusal. But it’s off to a good start.
I’ve created Google Plus Collections around Rihanna, robots and other themes.

Photos: Pop singer Rihanna (top) and Google Plus Collections page.