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Screencap: All of the articles published under the “CNET Money” byline are very general explainers with plain language questions as headlines. They are clearly optimized to take advantage of Google’s search algorithms, and to end up at the top of peoples’ results pages—drowning out existing content and capturing clicks. CNET, like Gizmodo and many other digital media sites, earns revenue from ads on its pages. The more clicks, the more money an advertiser pays for their miniature digital billboard(s).

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Screencap: All of the articles published under the “CNET Money” byline are very general explainers with plain language questions as headlines. They are clearly optimized to take advantage of Google’s search algorithms, and to end up at the top of peoples’ results pages—drowning out existing content and capturing clicks. CNET, like Gizmodo and many other digital media sites, earns revenue from ads on its pages. The more clicks, the more money an advertiser pays for their miniature digital billboard(s).
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Prof. Emily M. Bender(she/her) (emilymbender@dair-community.social)'s status on Thursday, 19-Jan-2023 23:10:48 JST Prof. Emily M. Bender(she/her)
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If the goal here is to save time for humans/expense of hiring humans, we'd want to check that the overall effort to fact check synthetic text is lower than the effort of writing + fact checking. I doubt it.
But Gizmodo suggests that the goal is SEO for ad clicks, making this is another clear example of two bad things:
1) The profit motive again distorting information access systems (see @safiyanoble
's _Algorithms of Oppression_)
2) Synthetic text polluting our information ecology.
>>

In conversation Thursday, 19-Jan-2023 23:10:48 JST from dair-community.social permalink