Collective euphoria turned to harsh reality for social media in 2017. Propaganda campaigns came to light. Bot armies continued to bully, intimidate, and harass. Warehouses of trolls pushed political agendas. Public-comment processes were polluted.
Manipulating attention has never been easier.
The key weakness of social media — an inability to ensure the authenticity of communication and interaction — will continue to be exploited in 2018. And it’s going to get a lot worse.
Artificial neural networks are advancing rapidly in their ability to synthesize content — including images, videos, and texts — that are increasingly indistinguishable from authentic content. Just look at the results of state-of-the-art face synthesis here. Phony Yelp reviews that read as legitimate opinion can be algorithmically generated at scale too. These technologies enable believable social posts and profiles to be automatically synthesized whole cloth, essentially “imagined” by neural networks, and they will overrun legitimate speech online. How will we have the debates, dialogues, and dialectic we need to run a democracy?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrgYtFhVGmg
In the arms race to secure the authenticity of online media, platforms will need to step up their internal protocols for both purging inauthentic accounts as well as identifying influence campaigns. They should be as transparent as possible about this without undermining their efforts. They should also recognize that this is too important an issue to take up solely on their own.
Journalists and other actors in civil society can play a role in helping to hold accountable the authenticity of the communications processes through which the public is informed. But they need far more access to data from platforms if they are to be effective. The platforms should enable this access, recognizing that observation by trusted parties will help identify how the system is being manipulated. Scale means that journalists also need powerful computational tools that can trace information flows. And the development of technically robust and adaptable media forensics tools will be essential so journalists can assess the authenticity of potentially synthesized media.
Appropriate data and tooling in the hands of computational journalists would enable the creation of a new beat covering social influence campaigns. An “online weather report” would show which ways the bot and troll winds were blowing and which topics or issues were being manipulated that day. By grappling with vast amounts of data using computational tools journalists could produce these reports (or even forecasts) that illuminate the flows of information online, fortifying the public against disingenuous and subversive media.
Nicholas Diakopoulos is an assistant professor of communication at Northwestern University.
Emily Goligoski Looking beyond news for inspiration
Tamar Charney We get serious about algorithms
Alastair Coote The year of self-improvement
José Zamora Revenue-first journalism
Hossein Derakhshan Television has won
Andrew Ramsammy The year ownership mattered
Sally Lehrman Trust comes first
Eric Ulken The year local publishers get smart(er) about change
Nikki Usher The year of The Washington Post
Molly de Aguiar Good journalism won’t be enough
Jassim Ahmad Thriving on change
Debra Adams Simmons And a woman shall lead them
Matt Carlson Attacks on the press will get worse
Vanessa K. DeLuca Women’s voices take center stage
Michelle Garcia Navigating journalistic transparency
Mario García Storytelling finally adapts to mobile
Cory Haik Suffering from realness, pivoting to impact
Helen Havlak Keywords, not publishers, power the world’s biggest feeds
Juliette De Maeyer A responsible press criticism
Rachel Schallom Better design helps differentiate opinion and news
Basile Simon We need better career paths for news nerds
Nicholas Diakopoulos Fortifying social media from automated inauthenticity
Alice Antheaume Are you fluent in AI?
Amy King Let’s amplify visual voice
Lanre Akinola Making noise is not a strategy
Alexios Mantzarlis Moving fake news research out of the lab
Adam Thomas Sharing is caring: The year of the mentor
Juleyka Lantigua Women of color will reclaim and monetize our time
Richard Tofel The platforms’ power demands more reporters’ attention
Miguel Castro The arrival of the impact producer
Federica Cherubini The rise of bridge roles in news organizations
Kathleen McElroy Building a news video experience native to mobile
Rubina Madan Fillion Unlocking the potential of AI
Taylor Lorenz Social and media will split
Dan Shanoff You down with OTT? (Yeah, DTC)
Raney Aronson-Rath Transparency is the antidote to fake news
Evie Nagy Pivot to mobile video frustration
Sarah Marshall Loyalty as the key performance indicator
Edward Roussel Eyes, ears, and brains
Monika Bauerlein The firehose of falsehood
Renée Kaplan The year of quiet adjustments (shhh)
Jennifer Brandel and Mónica Guzmán The editorial meeting of the future
Mary Meehan Real lives are at stake in rural areas
Mandy Velez texting is lit rn, fam
Amie Ferris-Rotman More female reporters abroad (please)
Matt DeRienzo A recession, then a collapse
Rick Berke Value is the watchword
Vivian Schiller Pivot to tomorrow
Mira Lowe The year of the local watchdog
Corey Ford The empire strikes back
Monique Judge Letting black women tell their own stories
Joyce Barnathan It will be harder to bury the news
Francesco Marconi The year of machine-to-machine journalism
C.W. Anderson The social media apocalypse
Dannagal G. Young Stop covering politics as a game
Kristen Muller The year of the voter
Craig Newmark Working together toward sustainable solutions
Ray Soto VR reaches the next level
Jamie Mottram From pageviews to t-shirts
Valérie Bélair-Gagnon Seeking trust in fragmented spaces
Jessica Parker Gilbert Design connects storytelling and strategy
Pete Brown Push alerts, personalized
Borja Echevarría TV goes digital, digital goes TV
Imaeyen Ibanga Longform video leads the way
Bill Keller A growing turn to philanthropy
Carlos Martínez de la Serna The new journalism commons
Cristina Wilson The year of the Instagram Story
David Skok Finding an information-life balance
Manoush Zomorodi Self-help as a publishing strategy
Amy Webb Listen to weak signals
Cindy Royal Your journalism curriculum is obsolete
Mi-Ai Parrish Blockchain and trust
Justin Kosslyn The year journalists become digital security experts
Jim Moroney Newspapers have to be good enough for readers to pay for
Emma Carew Grovum Newsroom culture becomes a priority
Yvonne Leow The rise of video messaging
Raju Narisetti Mirror, mirror on the wall
Trushar Barot The Jio-fication of India
Tanzina Vega It’s time for media companies to #PassTheMic
Eric Nuzum Beyond the narrative arc
Frédéric Filloux External forces
Sam Ford The year of investing in processes
Mariano Blejman News games rule
AX Mina Memes and visuals come to the fore
Pablo Boczkowski The rise of skeptical reading
Millie Tran and Stine Bauer Dahlberg (Hint: It’s about your brand)
Felix Salmon Covering bitcoin while owning bitcoin
Joanne Lipman Journalists inventing revenue streams
Matt Boggie The intellectual equivalent of the Dead Sea
Will Sommer The year local media gets conservative
Jennifer Coogan The future is female
Carrie Brown-Smith Transparency finally takes off
Jacqui Cheng Retailers move into content
Mary Walter-Brown Show a little vulnerability
Lucas Graves From algorithms to institutions
Rachel Davis Mersey AI, with real smarts
Umbreen Bhatti The trust problem isn’t new
P. Kim Bui The reckoning is only beginning
Ståle Grut Reclaiming audience interaction from social networks
Rodney Gibbs Tech workers turn to journalism
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen The Snapchat scenario and the risk of more closed platforms
Luke O'Neil The end is already here
Betsy O'Donovan and Melody Kramer Skepticism and narcissism
Tracie Powell The muting of underserved voices
Tim Carmody Watch out for Spotify
Andrew Losowsky The year of resilience
Mike Caulfield Refactoring media literacy for the networked age
Tanya Cordrey Finally, the seeds of radical reinvention
Jim Brady With the people, not just of the people
Dheerja Kaur Fun with subscription products
Julia B. Chan Looking for loyalty in all the right places
Matt Thompson Here come the attention managers
Brian Lam Sketchy ethics around product reviews
Damon Krukowski Reviving the alt-weekly soul
Kinsey Wilson Facebook and Google: Help out or pay up
Nicholas Quah Stop talking trash about young people
Sydette Harry Listen to your corner and watch for the hook
Jarrod Dicker Honesty in advertising
Hannah Cassius The year of the echo-chamber escapists
Ernst-Jan Pfauth Publishing less to give readers more
Ruth Palmer Risks will grow for news subjects — especially minorities
Errin Haines At the ballot, it’s time to count black women
Kyle Ellis Let’s build our way out of this
Zizi Papacharissi Women come back
Laura E. Davis Writing answers before you know the question
Michelle Ferrier The year of the great reckoning
Heather Bryant Building the ecosystems for collaboration
Julia Beizer A longer view on the pivot
Caitria O'Neill The new court of public opinion
Alfred Hermida Going beyond mobile-first
Jared Newman Venture funding and digital news don’t mix
Mariana Moura Santos Think local, act global
Marie Gilot No assholes allowed
Jesse Holcomb Information disorder, coming to a congressional district near you
Elizabeth Jensen Show your work
Feli Sánchez The year for guerrilla user research
Marcela Donini and Thiago Herdy Collaboration is the way forward for Brazilian journalism
Claire Wardle Disinformation gets worse
Alan Soon The rise of start of psychographic, micro-targeted media
Caitlin Thompson Podcasting models mature and diversify
Pia Frey Address users as individuals
Charo Henríquez Training is an investment, not an expense
Michael Kuntz The only pivot that might work
Gordon Crovitz Serving readers over advertisers
Christopher Meighan Passive partnership is in the rearview
Doris Truong Computer vision vs. the Internet vigilantes
Daniel Trielli The rich get richer, the poor scramble
Aron Pilhofer We can’t leave the business to the business side any more
Susie Banikarim R.I.P. Pivot to Video (2017–2017)
Joanne McNeil Gatekeeping the gatekeepers
Sara M. Watson Feeds will open up to new user-determined filters
Andrew Haeg The year journalists become relationship builders
Corey Johnson The pro-fact resistance
Jennifer Choi Standing up for us and for each other
Niketa Patel Live journalism comes of age
Sam Sanders Shine the light on ourselves
S. Mitra Kalita The arc of news and audience
Kawandeep Virdee Zines had it right all along
Steve Grove The midterms are an opportunity