Ben Smith NYT column:
But the referees who really matter nowadays are no longer the big media companies. The new referees are the Silicon Valley giants that control what we see when we search, browse or post online. But some in the news media learned lessons from back then, ones that Silicon Valley chief executives would be wise to reflect on this election season.
The biggest one is about false balance, and false symmetry. The American right and left have never been mirror images of each other. They’re different sorts of coalitions, with different histories and strategies.
And in the Trump era, a specific kind of misinformation on social media is a central tactic of the right. President Trump says false and misleading things at a remarkable rate — more than 20,000 so far in his presidency, according to a Washington Post tracker — and a whole constellation of blogs and websites, like The Gateway Pundit, support and amplify that strategy.
Facebook, Google and Twitter are making the same mistakes the news media made decades ago, looking for balance rather than confronting the plain reality of the moment.
That’s what Mr. Pichai did in response to Mr. Steube, who didn’t respond to an inquiry about what exactly had happened when, he said, he’d been unable to find Gateway Pundit several months ago. Mr. Steube might have typed the URL wrong, or he might have been referring to a moment in July when Google said a range of sites had search problems. Just a day before the hearing, to Gateway Pundit’s fury, the company said it was taking down a video about hydroxychloroquine, a drug that hasn’t been proven to be effective in treating the coronavirus.
But “the C.E.O. of Google can’t just come out and say, ‘The signals your site is sending and fact-checks on your content have created a problem for our company, and therefore we down-rank it,’” said Joan Donovan, the research director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. “Admitting that humans are often at the helm of decisions to curate content implies they are a media company and not simply infrastructure.”