Journalism’s truth-falsehood distinction directly opposes platforms’ radical indifference to content

Evidence

In a formal sense, professional journalism is the precise opposite of radical indifference. The journalist’s job is to produce news and analysis that separate truth from falsehood. This rejection of equivalence defines journalism’s raison d’être as well as its organic reciprocities with its readers. Under surveillance capitalism, though, these reciprocities are erased. A consequential example was Facebook’s decision to standardize the presentation of its News Feed content so that “all news stories looked roughly the same as each other… whether they were investigations in The Washington Post, gossip in the New York Post, or flat-out lies in the Denver Guardian, an entirely bogus newspaper.” This expression of equivalence without equality made Facebook’s first text exceptionally vulnerable to corruption from what would come to be called “fake news.” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1610

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘categories of equivalence’ recall the earlier chapters on radical indifference and equivalence as surveillance capitalism’s core move. — connects to: Blog-journalism’s lack of objectivity norms turns writers into micro-celebrities — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 352; Silicon Valley grants status through affiliation or self-proclaimed blogging legitimacy rather than credentials — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 480; Platforms treat content corruption as a problem only when it threatens surplus extraction — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1609 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Platforms replace asymmetry with reciprocity but lose editorial filtering #responds-to (0.85) — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 33