I’ve seen this come up quite a bit over the past several months and it’s quite frustrating. Many news articles reporting things as “new”, but it reality it’s simply confirming what is known based on inference and other public known information. There have been many articles where the entire premise is about this “new” thing.
For example, the WaPo story from yesterday – Russians took a page from corporate America by using Facebook tool to ID and influence voters. Thankfully, for this article it wasn’t the entire story’s focus – but a good example.
“The revelation about the use of Facebook’s Custom Audiences tool, which has not been previously reported, adds to an emerging picture of a Russian effort to shape the U.S. election and sow division using tools built by American technology companies.”
Now, there has been an overwhelming amount of information released about how they “microtargeted” voters and Facebook’s Custom Audiences tool is not some new thing – many people know about it.
It’s very frustrating when the entire article is focused around something that’s not new, but reported as new. It’s like the breaking news alerts comes through, you think “WTF happened now” –only to find out its nothing really new at all.
Anyone else frustrated with this? Is it just me – do I just read the news/twitter wayyyyy too much?