Rubel: Analytics, censorship and our poisoned information stream – Las Cruces Sun-News

6:38 p.m. MT April 8, 2017

Is all editing censorship?

The question came up during a recent Sunshine Week panel discussion at New Mexico State University when I expressed my frustrations with Facebook and online news outlets that make no effort to verify that what they are disseminating is true.

An audience member disagreed, arguing that if Facebook were to weed out the untrue stories, that would be censorship.

No, I responded, censorship is when the government prohibits something from being published. County Attorney Nelson Goodin, a fellow panelist, correctly pointed out that the word has more than one meaning. But I still couldnt grasp her argument.

She was claiming that any exercise of editorial discretion is, in fact, censorship. The Associated Press sends out several hundred stories every day. We only put a few of them in our newspaper. Thats censorship. The AP chooses its several hundred stories from the many thousands it could have reported on. That is also censorship. Any attempt to organize and prioritize the events of the day is censorship.

Is that what the new media has come to?

A few years ago, author Michael Lewis wrote a book called Moneyball, in which he explained how analytics had revolutionized baseball. Oakland As General Manager Billy Beane had snookered opposing teams with much larger payrolls by eschewing the common wisdom espoused by old-time scouts and instead listening to a bunch of computer nerds running probability ratios on runs and outs.

Now, you cant watch a ballgame without hearing somebody blather on about launch angle or exit velocity.

Analytics have taken over, and not just in baseball. We used to gauge the interest in our work based on subscriptions and reader feedback. Now we have internet and social media analytics on everything, supposedly to help guide the way.

On Tuesday, a rumor spread that actor Jim Carrey was driving through Las Cruces when his car broke down. A local resident helped him get his car fixed and took him to lunch. Carrey was so impressed that he said he was thinking about retiring here.

We checked it out and ran a brief story reporting that it wasnt true. And that, based on the analytics, was our top story of the day. On a day when there was important breaking news in the Tai Chan murder trial.

When I say we checked it out, that suggests a level of investigation greater than what was required. The website WBN10 News, which ran the story, has a disclaimer right on its home page telling readers it is a satirical and fantasy website. And yet enough people believed it that the rumor spread throughout town.

The writers in Russia and Macedonia offer no such disclaimers for the satirical and fantasy stories they inject into our daily news cycle, sometime just for fun and profit, but often to sway public opinion.

Which is where editors come in. We looked at the analytics, and decided that the Tai Chan murder trial story was still more important.

Facebook doesnt have editors. That would be censorship. It only has analytics. And, the guys in Macedonia have figured out how to climb to the lead of each days news feed.

There has been some great reporting on Russias attempts to influence our election, with more undoubtedly to come.

But the story being overlooked is how easily our information stream was poisoned and how willingly our citizens were duped. Russian propaganda is nothing new. Our susceptibility to it is.

Walter Rubel is editorial page editor of the Sun-News. He can be reached at wrubel@lcsun-news.com or follow @WalterRubel on Twitter.

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Rubel: Analytics, censorship and our poisoned information stream - Las Cruces Sun-News