The Meme-fication of news

After seeing the following article about Trump cutting aid to "3 Mexican countries", I was struck with how much it resembled a meme I would have seen on Twitter, created as a joke. Fox News later issued a correction for the error, but the headline was so absurd that I initially felt it had to have been done on purpose. Doesn't a news organization as big as Fox News have any kind of editors? Did nobody catch the mistake before airing?

Though it probably was an unintentional error, the meaning behind the words was very intentional. I think it's obvious that the impression Fox News was going for was that these three countries did not deserve US aid. Given that many Americans may not not even know where El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras are, it makes sense to me why they wouldn't use their names directly. Why wouldn't the writers just say "3 Latin American countries" though? Because putting in "3 Mexican countries" immediately activates assumptions in the viewers mind about a certain kind of people, as well as a suggestion about how to feel about the fact that Trump is cutting off aid to them. It has its opinion baked into it. There was an obvious agenda behind the phrase, aimed specifically at the standard Fox News viewer, the problem for them is that it achieved its goal through the formation of an absurd statement.

But due to the fact that its absurdity fit the meme format so well, it instantly was picked up by social media and spread just as fast as a "real" meme would have. I have to give credit to the writers for how memetically powerful the headline turned out to be. It not only activates strong opinions in a Fox News viewer's mind about immigration, tax dollars used for aid abroad, and brown people in general, but it also activates strong opinions in everyone else's mind about Fox News, how they're a trash news organization and how they unabashedly pander to their viewers' racism in order to push their own policy positions. And on top of if it all, the headline is funny due to the pure absurdity. It gets people talking and writing about it (like I'm doing) and eventually gets more clicks, not only for Slate who gets to write about it and shit on Fox News, but also for Fox News itself, as more people visit their site, comment, and engage with their platform. The headline becomes a kind of bountiful harvest for all new organizations involved. Fox News will not lose any viewership (and possibly gain people) and everyone else in the news ecosystem benefits from a satisfying story about how terrible Fox News is.

I think these kinds of headlines will only propagate and become more common as time goes on. Though this one may have been a mistake, I think these kinds of mistakes will become more common because they are, in reality, so beneficial to the current "high engagement" strategies that so much of media is pushing as a business model. Thinking about the current competition between media companies as a kind of ecosystem with limited resources (money and attention) I argue that the following will happen using a natural-selection-based chain of reasoning:

1. There are traits an organism can have that make it thrive in certain environment, and other traits that make it falter. Having flippers and gills is good in the ocean and bad on land. Making absurd clickbait headlines is great for engagement but bad for general knowledge.
2. Over time, through natural selection, organisms that have beneficial traits will survive and those that do not will be out competed and die off. Eventually, all news will purposefully create these kinds headlines in order to drive up engagement. There will always be niche news sources doing investigative journalism, but they will just be filling small niches with limited, paltry resources. Just like IKEA wardrobes will never fully get rid of designer hand-carved wardrobes, though very few people are actually buying the hand-carved wardrobes.

The chain of reasoning continues:

1. The memefication of news in turn has an effect on the environment. People have been thriving in the current world for a few hundred thousand years due to favorable conditions, but are now polluting the world with plastic and causing global warming which will eventually create an unfit environment for humans. In a similar way, the modified news environment will begin to change people's expectations for what news is, which may just lead to the eventual death of most news platforms.
2. As the environment changes and the old organisms' fitness begins to go down, it will be replaced by another, fitter organism. The fitter organism in this case, I think, will be conspiracy theory channels (e.g. InfoWars and Youtube style commentators). Eventually, after the news dies off, information about what's happening in the world will just be replaced by memes that are clever and shareable but very low in terms of facts.
3. It will be very hard to un-acidify our metaphorical oceans of information. So even though everyone hates the new way information is spread, it will difficult to return to an environment where real news is possible.

So if this the path we are going down, how does one stop it? To prevent the meme-ification of news, either the news must de-couple itself from social media, or the social media environment has to change to reduce the effectiveness of memes to spread.

Right now, neither are going to happen, because the resources that news needs is money and attention, and having things spread fast and virally is a great way to make money and grab attention. All the ways currently that I can think of how to curb this are unappealing and probably won't work in the long term. Maybe if Google or Facebook became a news monopoly, they wouldn't have competition for resources anymore, and then they could change their algorithm to suppress fake news, much like Facebook is doing with anti-vaxx articles now.

But no one wants to trust Google or Facebook to dispense their news, and for good reason. An actually good solution will need a certain amount of creativity in order to change the incentive structure of how news is shared in a subtle but meaningful way.