“THE BIGGEST PROBLEM is that Facebook and Google are these giant feedback loops that give people what they want to hear. And when you use them in a world where your biases are being constantly confirmed, you become susceptible to fake news, propaganda, demagoguery.” — American writer and former editor of The New Republic Franklin Foer
There is an alarming decline in Filipinos’ trust in news, falling 10 percentage points from last year’s survey to an all-time low of 28 percent, based on the results of the annual Reuters Institute Digital News Report survey.
The survey report has triggered great concern to local media outlets and has inspired a great deal of discussion on how the situation can be improved regarding outreach and audience perceptions.
The Reuters Institute survey was careful to make the point that Filipinos’ net distrust in news was broad-based and not necessarily directed at the traditional media and as a matter of fact, the distrust could be said to be directed more toward social media and self-styled independent media.
This is for the simple reason that a majority of Filipinos now prefer to access news through platforms such as Facebook (the most popular), TikTok, Instagram and various streaming platforms even as a majority of those prefer sources other than the social media channels maintained by mainstream news outlets.
However, there is a bit of a paradox in all of this, and it is revealed in two different ways: First, the same Reuters Institute survey found that slightly more than half of Filipinos engage in “news avoidance” at least some of the time, and secondly, fully two-thirds of Filipinos said they are “concerned” about whether or not the news they view online, from whatever source, is factual and not AI (artificial intelligence)-generated.
The second concern reflects a number of other recent studies that have shown a growing fatigue among online audiences due to the overwhelming proliferation of so-called AI slop that is generally quickly produced, of low-quality and of little useful substance and worse, containing misleading or outright false information.
This insight critically comes at a time when automated users, or ‘bots’, outnumber human users on the internet. A recent analysis by the web service firm Cloudflare found that 57 percent of internet traffic is generated by bots while only 43 percent is generated by human users.
Still, it is not just the characteristics of the online environment that erode trust in news. The Reuters Institute study also pointed out that in countries where trust declined the most year-on-year and over the past five years, there were conditions of political instability and divisive elections, direct attacks on journalists and news organizations and a noisier and more fragmented information environment both online and offline.
From our perspective, the pathways to solutions to improving public trust in the news, and for that matter encouraging the public to not actively avoid news and information they need, are very much limited.
Despite the occasional reassurances from popular websites such as YouTube and TikTokthat they will strictly police artificial content and fake news, media platforms are consequently of no help and really cannot be without changing their fundamental business model.
The truth is that this model treats all content regardless if it’s in-depth news and analysis, carefully crafted artistic or informative work by humans or AI slop as generic commodity because it prioritizes simple engagement (views, likes and shares) over subject matter and quality. Obviously, a politically chaotic and divisive environment is an aspect that is beyond our control.
Still, as our mission is to faithfully report the news factually and completely, whatever the news is, the final analysis points out that none of us who are media practitioners, whether traditional news organizations, purely online media enterprises or individual independent journalists, can control our environment. But we can continue to challenge the social media platforms’ enabling and encouragement of AI slop, disinformation and other valueless content, as well as government’s continued complacency toward harassment of the media.
In the end, let’s just simply spell out the fact that if the real problem is public trust in the media, then providing news and information the public can trust must always be at the center of our efforts. Finding ways to do so amidst the constantly evolving information environment will be a constant challenge for us, yet we are open to suggestions because after all these are said and done, we are here for the interest of others and not for our own sake.
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FOR your comments or suggestions, complaints or requests, just send a message through my email at cipcab2006@yahoo.com or text me at cellphone numbers 09171656792 or 09171592256 during office hours from Monday to Friday. Thank you and Mabuhay!