Mathew Ingram
Columbia Journalism Review
Toronto, ON, Canada
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Recent articles by Mathew:
Is engaging with readers the key to both trust and revenue?
As more media companies move toward subscription and membership-based models to generate revenue, engaging with readers has become ever more important. Yet some institutions seem uncomfortable with building community outside their walls. How should journalists approach this task? This week, I asked a group of experts during a week-long series of interviews on our Galley […] → Read More
How does fact-checking work when we can’t agree on the truth?
Last month, Facebook announced that it would exempt political advertising from the fact-checking standards imposed on the rest of its platform. The move was controversial. More than ever before, social media users are finding ways to debunk disinformation, yet the volume of inaccuracies and outright falsehoods never seems to diminish, thanks in large part to […] → Read More
Everyone is admitting what they get paid to work in journalism
When journalists want to talk among themselves about something difficult, the anonymous Google Doc seems to have become the mechanism. First there was the “Shitty Media Men” document, which was circulated in 2017, and eventually grew into a long list of alleged sexual harassers, working at some of the leading media outlets in the country. […] → Read More
Disinformation still running rampant on Facebook, study says
Most of the attention on Facebook and disinformation in the past week or so has focused on the platform’s decision not to fact-check political advertising, along with the choice of right-wing site Breitbart News as one of the “trusted sources” for Facebook’s News tab. But these two developments are just part of the much larger […] → Read More
Facebook, free speech, and political ads
A number of Facebook’s recent decisions have fueled a criticism that continues to follow the company, including the decision not to fact-check political advertising and the inclusion of Breitbart News in the company’s new “trusted sources” News tab. These controversies were stoked even further by Mark Zuckerberg’s speech at Georgetown University last week, where he […] → Read More
YouTube takedowns are making it hard to document war crimes
Like every other large social platform, YouTube has come under fire for not doing enough to remove videos that contain hate speech and disinformation. The Google-owned company has said repeatedly that it is trying to get better at doing so. But in some cases, removing videos because they contain graphic imagery of violence can be […] → Read More
YouTube takedowns are making it hard to document war crimes
Like every other large social platform, YouTube has come under fire for not doing enough to remove videos that contain hate speech and disinformation. The Google-owned company has said repeatedly that it is trying to get better at doing so. But in some cases, removing videos because they contain graphic imagery of violence can be […] → Read More
Zuckerberg wants to eat his free-speech cake and have it too
Facebook’s relationship to speech is complicated. The giant social network routinely takes down hate speech provided it meets certain criteria (although critics say it misses a lot more), along with gratuitous nudity, and other content that breaches its “community standards.” And it hides or “down-ranks” misinformation, although only in certain categories, such as anti-vaccination campaigns. […] → Read More
On Facebook, disinformation, and existential threats
Last week, The Verge published transcripts of two hours of audio leaked from a town hall with Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook. His comments included a reference to Senator Elizabeth Warren, whose plans to break up the company Zuckerberg called “an existential threat.” Some wondered: Would Facebook try to put its thumb on the […] → Read More
Some lessons from the MIT Media Lab controversy
When the news first broke that the MIT Media Lab had a close relationship with deceased billionaire and convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, some saw it as a momentary lapse in judgment, and there was widespread support for Media Lab director Joi Ito. But then New Yorker writer Ronan Farrow reported that the Epstein relationship was […] → Read More
What happens when Facebook confronts an existential threat?
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t do a lot of off-the-cuff speaking. His public appearances–whether before Congress or at a launch event—tend to be carefully scripted and rehearsed. A cardboard cutout would seem animated by comparison. All of which helps explain some of the excitement surrounding a Verge report this week, consisting of two hours of […] → Read More
Google plays hardball with European news publishers
While the US obsessed on Wednesday over what technically constitutes impeachment for a sitting American president, European news publishers were focused on something quite different: namely, a decision by Google to play hardball with French media companies when it comes to linking to their content in its search results. As of Wednesday, unless a French […] → Read More
What we’ve learned from our week of climate coverage
Today marks the beginning of a global climate strike and Monday will bring the UN Climate Action Summit, so we’re dedicating this installment of our newsletter to media coverage of climate, and whether it’s getting any better. This spring, CJR and The Nation co-founded Covering Climate Now, an unprecedented journalistic collaboration aimed at strengthening news […] → Read More
The Facebook Supreme Court will see you now
A year and a half ago, Mark Zuckerberg floated what seemed like a crazy idea. In an interview with Ezra Klein of Vox Media, the Facebook CEO said he was thinking about creating a kind of Supreme Court for the social network—an independent body that would adjudicate some of the hard decisions about what kinds […] → Read More
Source hacking: How trolls manipulate the media
Most people are probably familiar by now with the idea that there are “trolls” on the Internet. That is thanks in part to scandals like GamerGate and the rise of Donald Trump, the Troll-in-Chief. Many trolls have an agenda of some kind—as the infamous Russian Internet Research Agency, accused of seeking to sway the 2016 […] → Read More
What YouTube doesn’t say when it announces the removal of offensive videos
Google would really like everyone to know that its video sharing service, YouTube, is cracking down on offensive content. To that end, the company put on a full-court press this week, announcing that between April and June it had removed more than 100,000 videos and 17,000 channels for violating its hate speech rules, which is […] → Read More
Facebook and Twitter profit from Chinese propaganda
Last week, both Facebook and Twitter removed accounts and pages they said were part of a propaganda effort tied to the Chinese government, aimed at spreading disinformation about the ongoing protests in Hong Kong. According to Facebook, Twitter was the first to detect the campaign, and it then alerted its social-networking counterpart about “inauthentic behavior” […] → Read More
Facebook tries to rewrite the past by hiring journalists again
Journalists who cover Facebook get used to a sense of deja vu. The social networking behemoth often tends to revisit things it has tried to do once—or even multiple times—in the past. The company says that’s because it is committed to “iterating” (as tech founders like to call it), which means trying the same thing […] → Read More
Could WordPress + Tumblr create an alternative to Facebook?
When Verizon announced earlier this week that it was selling Tumblr, the blogging platform Yahoo acquired in 2013 for $1.1 billion, most of the attention focused on the price: according to Axios, the communications conglomerate sold Tumblr for just $3 million (Vox says closer to $2 million). In other words, Yahoo vaporized about 99 percent […] → Read More
Casey Newton on dismantling the platforms and taking Facebook’s cash
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. Coverage of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube tended to focus on benefits rather than the potential for harassment, abuse, and disinformation. “Yeah, I think we were naive,” Newton told me […] → Read More