Luke O’Neil hace un recuento de todas las historias falsas que compartimos en la internet en 2013.
(…) the New Jersey waitress who received a homophobic comment on the receipt from a party she had served; comedian Kyle Kinane’s Twitter beef with Pace Salsa; the Chinese husband who sued his wife for birthing ugly children after he learned she’d had plastic surgery; Samsung paying Apple $1 billion in nickels; former NSA chief Michael Hayden’s assassination; #CutForBieber; the exquisite, otherwordly weirdness of the @Horse_ebooks Twitter account; Nelson Mandela’s death pic; that eagle snatching a child off the ground on YouTube; Jimmy Kimmel’s “twerk fail” video; Sarah Palin taking a job with Al-Jazeera America (an obviously satirical story that even suckered in The Washington Post)
Aunque los periódicos siempre han usado el contenido barato y las noticias falsas para rellenar espacio, nunca ha sido como en 2013. La cultura de lo gratis ha llevado al periodismo a niveles paupérrimos :
Media malpractice like this didn’t trigger the collapse of traditional revenue models, but it’s hastening the job. Everyone wants everything for free now—news, music, movies, etc.—which means the companies don’t have any money to pay people to produce original work. None of this is anything you haven’t heard before, but it bears repeating. In order to make a living, those of us who had the bad sense to shackle ourselves to a career in media before that world ended have to churn out more content faster than ever to make up for the drastically reduced pay scale. We’re left with the choice of spending a week reporting a story we’re actually proud of (as I do just frequently enough to ensure a somewhat restful sleep every other night), reaping a grand sum of somewhere in the ballpark of two hundred to five hundred dollars if we’re lucky, or we can grind out ten blog posts at twenty-five to fifty bucks a pop that take fifteen minutes each. That means the work across the board ends up being significantly more disposable, which in turn makes the readers value it less, which means they want to pay less for it, and so on. It’s an ouroboros of shit.
O’Neil hace referencia a otro artículo de Ravi Somaiya y Leslie Kaufman para el NYT, en el que se discuten cómo la verdad sufre a la hora de crear contenidos virales:
The faster metabolism puts people who fact-check at a disadvantage,” said Ryan Grim, the Washington bureau chief for The Huffington Post, which reposted the fictional airplane tweets, the letter to Santa and the poverty essay. “If you throw something up without fact-checking it, and you’re the first one to put it up, and you get millions and millions of views, and later it’s proved false, you still got those views. That’s a problem. The incentives are all wrong.
Quizás porque tengo casi 20 años leyendo basura en internet, o porque tengo 15 de editor, verifico las fuentes antes de compartir alguna de estas noticias demasiado buenas para ser verdad. También hago un esfuerzo consciente por no hacer click en las «10 maneras en las que puedes conseguir un mejor empleo» y «No podrás creer lo que hizo este niño para librarse de su bully». Sin embargo, no dudo que dentro de unos meses, el poder del contenido viral nos llevará a un punto en el que las historias serán imposibles de verificar. En un océano de Buzzfeed, Huffpo, Upworthy y sus imitadores, la palabra escrita sólo sirve para acaparar clicks, no transmitir medias verdades.
Sigue leyendo The Year We Broke The Internet.
HT: Quico.