Teaching slides on the political impact of the Internet

I teach a class on the applications, technology and implications of the Internet and we begin each week with a discussion of current events relevant to the class. This semester many of those discussions have included material on the implications of the Internet for politics.

I've gone through my discussion slides for this term and put those that deal with the political impact of the Internet in a single, annotated PowerPoint file.

The slides focus on the current election, but also establish context by covering the use of then-new media in earlier elections, starting with radio, and other disappointing political uses of the Internet.

The slides are in chronological order as we have gone through the semester. If you are teaching a related class -- perhaps in political science -- you might find something useful. (I will continue adding new material -- suggestions welcome).

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Update 12/1/2016

I've added new slides dealing with the outing of fake news purveyors, truth versus freedom of speech, risk-limiting audits, a Stanford study of junior high, high school and college students reading of Internet news and the possibility that the Internet might become a "vast wasteland."

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Update 12/14/2016

I've added new slides dealing with National Security Advisor nominee General Mike Flynn's tweets concerning fake news. He later deleted one of the embarrassing tweets, but it had already been cached by the Internet archive.

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Update 12/17/2016

I've added slides dealing with General Flynn, European fake news, Tiananmen Square, the consequences of fake news, good journalism, Trump's continuing post-election lies and Facebook's effort to identify fake news.

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Update 12/20/2016

I've added slides on "Alt Right" gaming of Google search and Google's effort to thwart them.

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Update 12/21/2016

I've added new slides on "Alt Right" gaming of Google (and Bing) search, Google's effort to thwart them and a Pew Research survey on the public's view of fake news.

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Update 12/23/2016

I've added new slides on fantasy versus reality (examples from Trump and Bill Clinton) and whether they matter and Facebook's moves to combat fake news after first dismissing their role.

Update 12/27/2016

I've added new slides on the possibility of real-world consequences to fake news and Russian political hacking in Germany, Italy and the US.

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Update 1/6/2017

I've added new slides about the Panama Papers and what they reveal about Secretary of State nominee Rex Tillerson. (Collaborative analysis of the Panama Papers by journalists is a positive application of the Internet in politics).

The new slides are located here.

The cumulative slide deck is located here.

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Update 1/9/2017

I've added new slides tracing the impact of a single fake story on the Breitbart News Web site along with some background on Breitbart's Steve Bannon.

The new slides are located here.

The cumulative slide deck is located here.

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Update 1/16/2017

I've added new slides dealing with Trump's writing style on Twitter and his reaction to his briefing on Russian hacking by intelligence agencies. (His response also provides an illustration of his Twitter writing style.

The new slides are located here.

The cumulative slide deck is located here.

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Update 1/17/2017

I've added new slides dealing with Facebook's efforts to flag fake news in the US and Germany and possible fact-checking collaboration.

The new slides are located here.

The cumulative slide deck is located here.

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Update 1/19/2017

I've added new slides dealing with the Internet Archive and others in archiving Internet content that might be deleted or altered for political purposes.

The new slides are located here.

The cumulative slide deck is located here.

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Update 9/15/2017

The campaign is over and Trump is president, but I've gone back and added a couple of new slides -- one on Trump's continued lying and another on recent revelations about Facebook. They are part of a collection of lecture slides I used during the campaign. A subset used in another lecture may be found here. I've added the new slides to both decks.

Is Internet news inevitably concentrated and redundant?

I applied to register my blog on the Internet in Cuba with Google News, but was immediately (automatically?) rejected. My blog had 45,370 views last month and a friend told me a site had to have at least 150,000 views per month to be considered for Google News.

I don't know if that is the case, but I frequently post news before it turns up in Google News or as a Google Alert. (The two systems are separate).

Here's an example:

On August 27th, at 2 AM PDT, Bloomberg News published an article entitled "Cuba's Internet Dilemma: How to Emerge From the Web's Stone Age." by Indira Lakshmanan.

The article included a photo, a graph and two ads for IBM. In spite of being short, it had six bold-face section headings. I did not post anything about the article because it offered no news and had a significant misconception.

Later that day, I received a Google Alert for an article with the same title on the SunHerald site. The SunHerald version had a different photo and had cut the graph and sub-heads, but the body text was identical to the Bloomberg version. The byline credited "INDIRA A.R. LAKSHMANAN of Bloomberg News." Notice that she now had two middle initials and her name was all caps.

There was another credit at the end of the article: "Brian Womack contributed from San Francisco."

Brian did not change the body text, but he dropped the section headings and graph, changed the photo and gave Indira two middle initials and capitalized her name. Did his "contribution" take more than ten minutes?

The SunHerald version was preceded by a full-screen ad that I had to click to remove and, when the article was displayed, it had ads for liposuction, a bail bond service, a microwave oven (I had purchased one from Amazon earlier in the week), a smiling, blond investment adviser and two ads for the SunHerald publisher.

Well, this got my curiosity up, so I picked a random sentence from the middle of the article: "Last month, the state telecom monopoly ETECSA created 35 broadband Wi-Fi hotspots across the island, where the public can surf the Web, as Hernandez does" and Googled it. It turned up 18 full-text copies of the post.

Searching on the first sentence of the article: "Julio Hernandez is a telecommunications engineer, but like almost anyone else in Cuba who wants to get on the Internet, to do so he must crouch on a dusty street corner with his laptop, inhaling car exhaust and enduring sweltering heat", turned up many more hits, but a lot of those were snippets with links to a full-text version.

I searched Google Alerts on the key phrase "Cuba Internet" and turned up links to six full-text copies of the story: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6

I sent email queries asking about the criteria for inclusion in Google News to press@google.com and Stacie Chan, Media Outreach Manager, Google News, but neither replied. I also emailed the Bloomberg press office asking if they had licensed the article to the SunHerald and others, but received no reply.

This experience leads me to think that:

• Google's News and Alerts algorithms find stories on a topic, not necessarily news or novel analysis.
• Google's News and Alerts algorithms fail to detect redundancy, which may be intentional because it increases their ad revenue. (Might they discriminate in favor of sites with ads)?
• Google's algorithms seem to pay attention to sub-headings and images, but not body text, in screening for redundancy.
• Snippet posts often link to derivative copies rather than the original post (by Bloomberg in this case).
• Relatively small, focused, long-tail blogs and news sites are not likely to be seen by Google News or Alerts.

Is it inevitable that advertising-based, algorithm-driven Internet news will be redundant and increasingly concentrated in high-volume sites?

I hope not. Perhaps Google (or Facebook) will be clever enough to automate discovery of worthwhile long-tail news sites or use human curators to find them.

Disclosure: I have given permission for copies of blog posts to be posted by others (at no cost).

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Update 9/5/2015

As mentioned above, I sent email queries to Google when I got the idea for this post, but did not hear from them before I published it. This morning I got an email from Stacie Chan. Here is what she said:

There aren't any minimum number of clicks needed to get accepted as a News site into Google News. We do, however, have strict quality and technical guidelines that sites must follow to get and accepted and maintain their status in Google News. We accept smaller blogs/sites as well as larger ones.

Google Alerts, as you mentioned, is a separate product from Google News. But many of their sheets are triggered by a new article from publishers on our database.

Hope that helps!
Stacie

(I corrected what appeared to be two cell-phone typos).

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Update 10/3/2015

I follow the keyword "ETECSA" on Google Alerts and Google recently alerted me to a post on Cuban plans for home Internet connectivity at Frogoff.com. (ETECSA is Cuba's state-run Internet service provider).

The post was an identical copy -- text, title and images -- to my earlier post.

I don't really care that the slimeballs running Frogoff.com copied my post, but I do care that Google Alerts linked to it, not mine. Google will not tell me how they decide which sites to include in News and Alerts, but, whatever it is, it rewards parasites like Frogoff.com and overlooks relatively small, specialized long-tail sites that cover a given topic. (In this case, the state of the Cuban Internet).

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Update 10/12/2015

I received the following Google Alert yesterday:

ETECSA is Cuba's government monopoly telecommunication company. The message alerts me to the fact that ETECSA upgraded their cell phone network in 1999 -- not exactly "news."

The alert links to ETECSA's Wikipedia page. Evidently, Google sends an alert to any change in a page that contains the alert keywords. The alert was not caused by the cell network upgrade, but that sentence contained the term "ETECSA." In fact, the most recent change to the ETECSA page in Wikipedia was made on August 12, so the non-news alert is two months old.

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Update 11/25/2015

Here is another type of Google Alert failure:

This appears to be a link to a post on the BN Americas news site about a service outage at Cuban email provider ETECSA, but it is not. Instead, it is a link to a post on a spam site called WN.com.

As you see below, the WN page has one sentence on the ETECSA outage, hidden in a sea of spam links and illustrated by a couple dancing on the beach. Can you find the link to the BN Americas article?

Can't Google come up with an algorithm or black list to filter out this sort of "news?"

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Update 1/31/2016

I have a longstanding interest in satellite Internet connectivity for developing nations, so have been watching SpaceX's attempts at recovering booster rockets. They tried for the third time to recover a rocket on a drone barge at sea on January 17, but failed. I watched the launch webcast and posted a note on the failure the following morning.

Since I am interested in the topic, I have subscribed to "Musk-Satellite" Goggle Alerts, and at 10:08 Sunday morning, I received one on a Washington Post article entitled "Elon Musk's SpaceX to attempt another rocket landing. This time with a twist."

Judging by the title, the article had been written before it was known that the attempt had failed, but it now says the landing failed and includes several tweets time stamped after 10:08 AM. Evidently, the story was revised after it was first posted.

But, that was just the first Google alert -- I have received 158 more since then, many of which link to two or three articles on the failed recapture. I've looked at several of these articles -- they provide no additional analysis.

They are slowing down now -- I have only received two so far today. By the time these Alerts stop, I will have received links to hundreds of redundant articles, and thousands of ad impressions.

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Update 3/12/2016

A blog copied everything I posted on my blog on the Internet in Cuba for years. Both blogs are on Google's Blogger site. Can't Google detect that sort of thing? Are they incented to do so -- I guess they make money on pirated click-bait ads.

News 2.0? Reporting with Google hangouts.

California gasoline prices jumped to record highs this week, and the Los Angeles Times covered the story in their print edition. But, when I asked a class of 25 students how many read the LA Times, only three said they did.

I can also imagine this being covered on TV news -- a reporter standing in front of a gas station ... the camera pans from her to the price sign and back ... she comments that prices have risen by a dollar a gallon in a short period of time ... she interviews a customer who complains about the price hike ... It ends up being a 60-second spot, then on to the next story or a commercial.

I also asked my students how many watched TV news regularly. Again three said yes.

It turns out that the LA Times also covered the story in the following 8-minute Google hangout between two Times writers and an expert on energy and gasoline prices.

During this interview/discussion we heard why the prices shot up, how high they might get, when we might expect to see them come back down, why gas does not come in from out of state, tactics of the gasoline station owners, the global determinants of oil prices, etc.

Is there a demand for this sort of relatively in-depth reporting? Will this sort of coverage become common in the future? If so, how will people discover the stories they want to focus their attention on?

And, what about the business model? How much did this hangout cost to produce? Perhaps the two Times writers spent half an hour planning the interview and getting in touch with the expert. The participants all stayed in their offices and the call itself took no more than 15 minutes. When the hangout ended, it was automatically posted on YouTube. That is the good news. The bad news is that the three people were well-paid, articulate professionals so their time is valuable.

Can we find a viable business model with revenue from ads, subscription fees, pay-per-view fees, etc. to cover the cost?