The writer says public engagement does not necessarily equal public interest, and certainly not public benefit. Read more at straitstimes.com.
DHAKA - In recent years, especially after the pandemic, electronic and print news outlets in Bangladesh have been increasingly reshaping their business models, adjusting their editorial practices, restructuring their resources, and adopting new tactics so that they can, too, board the “online train.”
Let’s consider a national news daily named A. Till now, A’s business model has been to get enough circulation, accept that its direct sales can never be enough, and try to sell circulation numbers to commercial clients for ads. To acquire and retain subscriptions, A needs a consistently good product.
The online strategists analyse the tips provided by social media platforms and train the employees and even the higher-ups on how to win online with these easy-to-moderate hacks. Employees with better online stats get a pat on the back from the team leader, and that team leader gets the same from upper management.
These tech giants, with consumer populations larger than any empire or nation in history – Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc – are basically in the information business. They want two simple things from their users: i) every possible kind of personal data; and ii) every moment of everyone’s lives on their platforms so that they can sell ads and get as much personal data as possible.
In 2022, militias in Ethiopia used those intolerance-loving algorithms for ethnic violence. I may not have found many large-scale studies on Facebook algorithms’ correlation with recent religious riots in Bangladesh, but I’m pretty sure it’s not that far-fetched. The national survey on news literacy in Bangladesh conducted in 2020 by the MRDI and Unicef found that 76 per cent of the country’s population has low news literacy, and half of the population is unaware of the importance of checking news accuracy.
But if they’re diluting that trust, I don’t know how long they can afford said resources. What scares me the most is that this has the potential to not only damage the current state of this industry, but also leave a permanent scar on the credibility of journalism as a public interest institution.
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