This morning I woke up and looked at my Yahoo feed for the latest news expecting to see something about last nights presidential address and Democratic response. It is a huge story after all.
Instead the lead story was “2nd man found dead at Democratic donor’s home.” None of the other stories in the head line scroll had anything to do with last night either. Only when I scrolled down below the home page did I find a story about the president’s speech and below that one titled, “Democrats: Trump using misinformation, malice in wall debate.”.
The donor was not George Soros. and the news value of the suspicions about this individual rate no better than a local story in his community. So why was this the national lead story?
To me this is a perfect example of what is wrong with tech media companies and how the Republicans have succeeded in blocking efforts to defend against Russian interference.
Yahoo must be using an automated algorithm to do the editorial work of organizing and prioritizing their feed. No objective human editor could have made such a judgement to bury the biggest story of the moment (except maybe Fox, but that proves my point about objective editing). It seems obvious to me that Russian actors are at work manipulating and ginning up a negative story about a Democratic nobody to displace relevant and damming stories about their puppet.
This isn’t rocket science which makes me all the more disgusted with Yahoo for failing to defend against this kind of thing. If they and others like FaceBook are going to be platforms for disseminating information in our democracy than they have a fiduciary duty to actively prevent and combat this Russian interference. Our government also has a primary responsibility which is why the Republicans in charge are complicit in limiting Federal government efforts to defend us in this cyber war.
We are under attack. It is long past due for tech companies and the government to start acting that way.