Are your online newsreading choices really your own?
Kolkata, September
25:
Lopamudra
Mitra Paul (43), a Kolkata-based mid-level HR professional working for a San
Jose-headquartered IT company, has stopped being loyal to any newspaper. She
follows different newslinks through Facebook.
She
is not alone. Millions do the same worldwide, guided by technology companies
such as Facebook, Twitter, Google and Apple, which have emerged as the popular,
if not the most popular, news intermediaries.
However,
Jeffry Herbst, President and CEO of the Newseum and Newseum Institute in
Washington DC, says “readers are getting one (-sided) perception of news
because algorithms decide that what they read is the most read.”
The
Newseum is an interactive museum of news and journalism and, the Newseum
Institute explores the challenges confronting freedom around the world.
Automated reasoning
An
algorithm performs automated reasoning tasks. In effect it acts as the editor
of editors, removing the diversity in presentation of the same news from
different perspectives in different newspapers.
The
result is that the intimate relationship between a newspaper and its readers is
lost.
Facebook
determines which articles, how and what articles of the newspaper should be
read.
Aftenposten, Norway’s largest newspaper, was
therefore not far from the truth in describing Mark Zuckerberg as the “world’s
most powerful editor” during the recent controversy over censoring the iconic
Vietnam war napalm bomb victim’s photo.
“I
think, the dream of social media flowering opinion is now diminished, Herbst
said earlier this month, addressing the 2016 East-West Centre International
Media conference in a Skype session from Washington.
Regards
Pralhad Jadhav
Senior Manager @ Library
Khaitan & Co
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