Sky Views: The internet killed time. Don’t let truth be next
Rowland Manthorpe, technology correspondent
Of all the things the internet killed - record stores, Ceefax, the original meaning of the word "troll" - perhaps the most important was time.Not the fourth dimension itself (although if the Silicon Valley billionaires working on uploading their minds into the cloud get their way, the mortal coil part of it may become as irrelevant as the fax machine), but the experience of things happening one after the other. I suppose you might say that the internet killed chronology.
This week marks the 40th anniversary of a revolutionary device: the original Sony Walkman. When it appeared, it was described as "personalised", but it wasn't, not in the way we think of it today -- because although you could carry your music around with you, you still had to listen to it in a pre-defined order.
On TV or radio, the same was true. With some recording equipment, you might be able to skip backwards and forwards, but you still moved through time in a linear fashion.
On today's digital platforms, that's no longer the case. When I open my phone, everything is out of order. Netflix tells me that Friends is trending. On Twitter, an Elizabeth Warren debate clip has gone viral. YouTube wants me to watch a montage of Gareth Bale's Real Madrid goals set to bad house music. Chronology has been replaced by "relevance". Who decides what's relevant? The companies' secret algorithms, which now effectively filter most of the internet.
Take, for instance, political neutrality. On television, rules laid down decades ago decree that broadcasters have to show "due impartiality", especially on major political controversies. But what does this mean when the material is chosen by an algorithm?
To assess these breaches -- which, it is worth saying, RT is appealing -- Ofcom staff took into account the context. This is no gesture. Section two of the Ofcom code contains an exhaustive list of all the meanings of context, which includes the time, the programmes before and after, the composition of the audience and the audience's expectations of the programme. "Context," the code says, "matters". Yet, as soon as the clips get cut up and thrown on to social media, the context changes out of all recognition.
The digital platforms don't just strip away the context of "before" and "after". Because timelines are no longer chronological, what an old person might call the "scheduling" is completely opaque. Sometimes it's just jumbled and confusing in that now-familiar internet way. At other times it's downright concerning.
In April, non-profit AlgoTransparency found that YouTube disproportionately recommended RT's analysis of special counsel Robert Mueller's report into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. According to AlgoTransparency's founder, ex-YouTuber engineer Guillaume Chaslot, RT was the most widely-recommended channel on the whole of YouTube for Mueller videos.
When I asked YouTube about this finding, its spokesperson didn't mince their words. Describing the report as flawed and inaccurate, it emphasised that it was hardly in its business interest to promote this kind of content. But the firm offered no data to support its conclusion -- and a few weeks after AlgoTransparency's report, I found something equally worrying.
As I searched on Google for terms relating to news events, I noticed that the videos it placed prominently in its search results often promoted misinformation or conspiracy theories. Digging deeper, I found a pattern of sensationalist videos -- a disproportionate amount of which came from RT.
A search for the phrase "yellow vest", for instance, produced only RT videos, which appeared high up in the results.
Google told me it was prioritising authoritative sources, especially on sensitive topics, and that deliberate misinformation online was "a major concern". But it's hard to see how that result meets the definition of "due impartiality".
Even these findings fail to convey the true power of the algorithm. In order to see how Google appeared to the average user, I searched in incognito mode, which does not weight results by factors such as browsing history or location.
In reality the results would be heavily personalised, directed towards the people most likely to find them relevant. As the Ofcom code shows, this matters. But, right now, the only referee is Google (which owns YouTube) itself.
Why does this matter? Because these platforms are the gatekeepers for the world's information. Everything flows through them, even the most fraught political controversies. Today, there will be a by-election in Brecon and Radnorshire.
Yet right at this very moment Britain's political parties are running attack ads on Facebook.
How do they reach their target? Through the Facebook algorithm, of course -- the biggest AI in the world, focused with total intensity on the task of making you click on that promoted post.
Calling for regulation is something journalists do when they've run out of ideas -- but in this case regulation is desperately needed.
The government should ban micro-targeting for political advertising immediately, and pass legislation giving it the power to get proper data from the digital platforms - then, at least, it can assess what's really happening. As it is, the logic of the internet remains a trade secret.
One that makes the top Google result for "RT fine" an article from RT calling the outcome "inappropriate and disproportionate". The internet killed time. At this rate it's on its way to killing truth as well.
