Thread by @Pinboard

The Wall Street Journal's "Facebook Files" has been widely lauded. But every article in the series also contains Facebook tracking scripts, and this clear conflict of interest (along with the WSJ's financial relationship with Facebook) is never mentioned. wsj.com/articles/the-f…

This is not unique to the WSJ, but part of a dismaying industry standard in journalism. For example, the New York Times ran a flagship series on privacy, complete with earnest editorial calling for regulation, that was stuffed with ad trackers.

https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1116354502032932865

The New York Times went so far as to run an op-ed from the CEO of Google without disclosing either the site's close financial relationship with Google or its role in enabling internet-wide surveillance by the tech giant.

https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1126130280916561923

By my count, the WSJ's Facebook Files series alone serves tracking scripts and other cruft from over 100 outside domains, including Yahoo, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and a rogue's gallery of ad tech intermediaries. The industry practice where this is not disclosed is indefensible.

Whatever harms social media has caused have been abetted at every step by major news sites, who have always pushed the frontiers of invasive surveillance and reader-hostile tracking. Editors' decision to exempt this fact from disclosure diminishes their reporters' stellar work.

The Privacy Project solved this conundrum by launching with an "adtech, man, what are we going to do?" editorial by the publisher later linked as a catchall disclaimer, and concluding with the decision that maybe sacrificing all this privacy was worth it.

https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1151239146419003394

We need investigative journalism on Big Tech that is not so financially beholden to the companies it is trying to cover. In the absence of that, and while we wait, readers at least deserve a clear disclosure of business relationships on such articles. It's the web, there's room!

It also wouldn't hurt for participants in this unsavory practice to grow a spine and force disclosure. On the Privacy Project, I talked to people all the way up to editor who said "I hate this, I sent email about it, but what can I do?" Pity the powerless NYT editors out there.

Facebook makes an attractive and compelling villain, but the problem is systemic, and hiding this fact only makes large news sites' relationship with readers more adversarial. It's like telling grapes all about how evil Ernest and Julio Gallo are while you pick them.

The people who built this extractive and exploitative system of delivering online journalism are the ones now who weep the loudest about the spread of misinformation, and why people don't trust them as much as they should.

The status quo on privacy is that most prominent voices are former employees of big tech, the privacy think tanks all take tech money, Congress also takes the money and relies on social media for fundraising and campaigning, and journalism lives and dies by tracking and virality.