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Combatting Information Erosion: Protecting Access to Reliable News
As U.S. information
technology giants vie to develop generative AI, research firm Gartner, Inc.
released a prediction in February, saying, “By 2026, traditional search engine
volume will drop 25%, with search marketing losing market share to AI chatbots
and other virtual agents.”
When keywords are
entered into Google and other search engines, the titles of related
websites appear. Users access one or more of their own choices. But generative
AI is now changing this typical behavior.
Microsoft Corp. introduced
an AI chatbot to its Bing search engine site in February 2023. In May of the
same year, Google also started using generative AI on its search
engine site. When users of these sites enter keywords related to what they want
to know, generative AI provides “answers” in a few seconds. Users do not need
to access multiple websites.
“When people start to see
answers created by generative AI, the opportunities for them to accidentally
encounter new information will significantly decrease,” said Go Sugihara, chief
executive officer of ATARA, LLC, a Yokohama-based consulting company
well-versed in matters concerning IT giants.
Social media users also are
losing their chances to get various types of information. They are guided
by platform companies to linger for a long time in their services, and as a
result, the number of times they access and look at outside news websites
declines.
A January report from
Britain’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism said traffic to news
sites from Facebook fell 48% in 2023, with traffic from X (formerly Twitter)
declining by 27%. These figures were taken from data sourced from a
U.S. analytics provider.
Platform businesses want to
raise their profits by getting users to stay on social media longer and look at
ads, so they make the messages that would guide users to outside news sites
less noticeable. Opportunities for users to access various information have
been decreasing without their knowledge.
Report author Nic Newman
said that although social media has been a means to transmit information to
those who are not particularly interested in news, people
are being completely cut off from news.
“Resistance” to fake information is nurtured by absorbing a variety of information in a well-balanced manner. But opportunities to do so have rapidly been lost.
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