ICYMI: Journalists need more help than ever coping with work trauma (Zuckerberg admitted in an interview with Vox last year that for the first decade of Facebook’s life, all he thought about was the positive aspects of connecting billions of people in real time.) I also asked Newton whether he thought the government should be regulating or breaking up Facebook, Google, and other mega-platforms. I asked Newton whether he thought Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg or Twitter’s Jack Dorsey should be held personally responsible for not foreseeing the problems their platforms have caused. And we’ve been catching up to those consequences ever since.” “What had looked like fun distractions turned out to be far more consequential. “We saw how weak the platform defenses were,” he said. Some reporters and academics saw the darker aspects of these networks, Newton said, but for most “that narrative was secondary to the question of whether these businesses would survive and thrive.” That all changed with the 2016 election, he said, when it became obvious how easily social platforms could be exploited by foreign states to spread propaganda. Newton, a former senior writer at CNET and reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, said that, for the most part, journalists in Silicon Valley covered social platforms either as technological success stories or focused primarily on them as business stories, writing about IPOs and valuations. The ability for anyone to beam a message instantly to hundreds of millions of people was new in human history, and for a while it wasn’t clear how that power would be used.” “There had never been social networks with billions of users before, and it was difficult to predict the consequences that would come with global scale. “Yeah, I think we were naive,” Newton told me on CJR’s discussion platform, Galley. Coverage of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube tended to focus on benefits rather than the potential for harassment, abuse, and disinformation. Most technology journalists were too credulous in the early days of the social web, Verge senior editor Casey Newton said in a recent interview with CJR.
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