automatic journalism

Amidst all the turbulences on the financial markets these days, a funny event some days ago got less attention than it might have deserved: A newspaper article from 2002 titled "United Airlines Files for Bankruptcy" got picked up by Google News, was falsely presented as a new story there, was again picked up by the Bloomberg financial news agency, and this led to a drastic plunge in United Airlines shares. Apparently after a certain stage the selling of shares was also automatic - there are computer programmes for this... About a billion dollars of market value were lost before trading was stopped! Afterwards, a blame game started between the Tribune company which owns the newspaper (the South Florida Sun-Sentinel) and Google. (Of course, Google News functions without any editor, it is a totally automatic search engine.) The New York Times explained:

Tribune said in a statement that its archived bankruptcy article had simply been there online all along. The statement blamed “the inability of Google’s automated search agent ‘Googlebot’ to differentiate between breaking news and frequently viewed stories on the Web sites of its newspapers” for the problem.
For its part, Google said it was unfair to blame it for Tribune’s mistakes, including the failure to date the article properly, and the failure to use one of many simple methods to prevent links to old articles from appearing on a news page or being seen by a search engine.

Sounds quite technical to me... What about letting human beings with a brain come in between all the engines sometimes?

web movement for democracy

I find the advocacy website Avaaz.org (avaaz means "voice" in Urdu, Hindi and many other languages) one of the most inspiring attempts to use the internet for political activism. They run global campaigns on different issues, have a truly global agenda and a broad range of debate within the community. Interesting reading, for example, their questions and answers with British Foreign Secretary David Miliband. The future of global politics?

online mobbing

A journalist colleague A works for B website here in Germany. When he rejected another colleague C's manuscript and asked him to make some amendments before publishing, C got upset. C happens to belong to a certain group D. As there are certain conflicts between groups D and E, A had been of the opinion that C's manuscript didn't reflect the viewpoint of E group well enough. So far, a normal story.

 

Anyway, C got the impression that A doesn't like D group, and that this was the reason for his behaviour. The next thing that happened was that C shared his version with some people of D group. Suddenly, certain websites spread the word that A was against group D. And whereas the conflict between A and C has long been settled, A continues to find claims that he is against group D at the top of the list whenever he googles his own name...

  

I find the story totally scary, but it's probably not that unusual, as media reports about "cyberbullying" from South Korea and the United States show - both cases are more serious than what happened to A. 

Nothing entirely new either - bullying and mobbing happen offline as well. Hopefully, with some legal reforms, there may be ways of handling the problem in future. In the meantime, better be careful...

new media - new politics?

Barack Obama has created a website to fight rumours about him that are mostly spread on the internet. OK, maybe it's not really adequate and wise to label it a "smear" if people spread the word that Barack Obama is a Muslim (he is a "committed Christian", of course, according to his website) - but it clearly shows one thing: In American politics, blogs are considered influential. You cannot simply ignore them any more. I don't think this could happen in Europe yet - but in some parts of Asia, the role of the web in politics is even bigger. And I'm not even talking about places like China, Iran or Myanmar where blogs are one of the few ways to express your views at all. Consider Malaysia, where Jeff Ooi might be the world's first parliamentarian who was elected because he was a well-known blogger. Or South Korea, where the latest protests against US beef imports have been labeled "digital populism", according to the International Herald Tribune. High school students started the agitation first after discussing the dangers of US beef on an internet discussion forum...

The mainstream media and the government ignored them at first. But protesters stepped forward as "citizen reporters," conducting interviews, taking photographs and, thanks to the country's high-speed wireless Internet, uploading videos on their blogs and Internet forums.

But there's a flip side to their activism: It's easy to spread rumours and create panic in the web community. The IHT report gives an example:

One scientifically unproven claim that circulated on the Internet was that Koreans have a gene that makes them particularly susceptible to mad cow disease.

Interestingly, the activists even put pressure on the more moderate mainstream media in order to make their and only their version of the story heard:

Protesters...flooded companies with phone calls warning of product boycotts if they did not withdraw ads from the country's three main conservative dailies, whose editorials urged "reason and rationality."

I wonder how the papers can react... Maybe start an anti-rumour website like Barack Obama?