"If 'activism' disappears behind a paywall and you still think it's activism, never submit to the temptation to take an IQ test."
“Annoying”, “infuriating”, “irate”… Just some of the language that's regularly used with regard to the discovery of gated content at the dark end of a social media link. Links to content that the vast majority of people can't access have now reached spam-wave volume on social platforms, as money-focused publishers line up to cash in on the lucrative new craze.
The practice has generally slipped through the spam net so far, but an ever-rising proliferation of what to most people are dead links, makes for an extremely poor user-experience on the Social Web. And worse, the inaccessibility of the content is promoting the spread of misinformation, as wildly exaggerated, trickbait titles become “reference works” in themselves, without the tempering effect of body text.
“HEADLESS SHARING”
A surprising number of people will still spread links to articles they're unable to read, if the titles of those pieces support their agenda. If you search the keyword “paywalled” on Twitter you'll find people actually admitting they haven't read an article to which they're sharing a link, and are only passing it on because they support the premise of the title.
But the content they're spreading could be parody, could be speculative, could even contain extremist speech such as racism / antisemitism, gender-based hatred, or incitement of violence. Indeed, publishers of extremist matter can even use gating and paywalling as a means to boost the search status of their content through preliminary link-spread, before removing the gate to leave a highly visible piece of propaganda.
Twitter has already expressed concern about users who amplify content without first reading it - and has taken some fairly hot-headed measures to stop it happening. And yet paywalled links, which in typical circumstances less than one percent of the social media audience even can access, don't appear to have caught the eye of Twitter's anti-misdirection policy-makers at all. The probable reason?… Twitter has its own paywalling extravaganza in the pipeline, and won't want to look like it's exhibiting double standards.
WHY GATED CONTENT LINKS ARE A PROBLEM ON SOCIAL MEDIA
This post is not an objection to paywalls. It's an objection to the increasingly normalised spread of inaccessible links on social media, where out-of-control misinformation and dangerous propaganda are already a problem, and inaccessible, trickbait-titled content obviously contributes to that problem in heavy measure. There's also the argument that for most people, links to gated content are useless and nothing but a sales call, and they therefore satisfy the definition of spam.
In breakdown, among the problems with gated (and particularly paywalled) links on social media, we find…
Publishers who paywall are incentivised to wildly exaggerate or flat-out fudge their titles in order to bait subscriptions. In other words, paywalled and gated content will typically be among the worst offenders in the trickbait stakes. We saw extensive evidence of this on Medium, when the platform switched to a pay-to-read model. Post the change, a lot of “premium” Medium articles have been so irrelevant to their titles that it would be impossible for a third party to match the post and headline together if they became detached.
Some ideological influencers have begun to deliberately link from social media to paywalled third-party articles as a propaganda strategy, because they know the chances of opposition voices being able to dispute the title's claim are very low. Indeed, if opposition voices are hostile to the publisher, they will not, on principle, pay that publisher for access to the content. And we can evidence the extremely low access rates through the lack of argument from opposing voices when a gated post is cited.
When ideological posts are accessible, we see a slapback of dispute. Some influencers have even been “ratioed” in the past, with the mass of dissenting replies outnumbering the total of Likes from their supporters.
If those same influencers are now citing paywalled content to total opposition silence, there's only one explanation. The percentage of opposition voices who will actually read paywalled, or even signup-gated citations, is ostensibly nil. In digital, ideological warfare, content-gating serves very effectively as a contradiction-filter. Without any contradiction at all, a rabble-rouser's audience will inevitably be much more easily persuaded that the claims they're being fed are true.
We are increasingly seeing paywalling within so-called activism. It's a nonsense. If "activism" disappears behind a paywall and you still think it's activism, never submit to the temptation to take an IQ test. Activism is about communicating a genuine concern to the widest possible audience with a view to mobilising mass support for change. Paywalling by nature cuts out the bulk of the potential audience. Paywalling is content-capitalism. Not activism.
We know at once - or at least we should know - that someone claiming an article is “a vital-to-read social justice piece”, and then gating it, is not to be trusted. But these tranches of faux activism are the exact places where content-gating is being abused to spread misinformation. To lock out the dissenters, whilst profiting from the gullibles.
The more social media audiences come to expect paywalled content, the more likely they are to dismiss externally-linked matter without even attempting to access it. That will further worsen the tide of blind acceptance which is driving online hatred.
Because of the way links to content are augmented with media in snippeting protocols, publishers can also use an evocative image to deliberately mislead opinion, with the inconvenient facts tucked away behind a gate that opposition voices will not pass.
Because gated content is non-searchable and thus thwarts all conventional methods of plagiarism-detection, paywalled content is an inevitable hotbed of plagiarism and neo-plagiarism.
"If you support hiding content when it advantages you, you can't really complain about other people hiding content when it disadvantages you. If you have a problem with other people hiding content (i.e. your spam), stop hiding content yourself. Take your paywall down and monetise by alternative means."
CONTENT CAPITALISM = INFERIOR QUALITY
Gated content is of lower quality than the most visible freely-accessible content. No really, it is! Everyone trying to sell you subscriptions will tell you otherwise, but the fact is that freely-accessible content is born out of enthusiasm and first-hand passion, and competes at the highest level, whereas paywalled content is born out of content-capitalism, and its gated portion doesn't really have to compete at all. I will explain that in a moment.
The only universal difference between paywalled content and freely-accessible content is the publisher's desire for more revenue. And a desire for more revenue is in no way related to expertise, innovative thinking or talent.
Enthusiasts write better content than content-capitalists. And indeed, many articles published by content-capitalists are merely re-spins of enthusiasts' existing work, with the headlining changed to port the article's focus across to a more lucrative audience.
I speak from personal experience. I've had content-capitalists approach me to write content for them, and they invariably want spins of stuff I've already written. When I tell them I don't spin work from my own blogs, they find someone else to spin it. One even gave me the name of another writer he would get to produce the content if I wouldn't do it.
They don't give a stuff about the subject matter, and they don't care that it's already on the Internet. For them, it has nothing to do with the buzz of breaking new ground or unearthing new information. They just want to adopt and control the reference work as a means for profit. Paywalled content generally has a very specific formula. New title, old body text (albeit typically reworded). By far the best material on the Internet is freely-accessible.
Let's also remember that the incentive with paywalled content is to keep the number of contributors to a minimum, because essentially, every contributor will want a cut of the subscription fee. Due to the likely objections from contributors, we would not expect to see heavily collaborative resources like Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, etc, functioning well behind paywalls. So paywalled content also shows itself to be collaboratively limited in ways that major freely-accessible resources are not.
Another archetypal negative with gated content is that its producers have a low competitive incentive as regards the portion of their output that sits behind the paywall or gate.
With freely-accessible content, everything is out in the open for direct comparison. Freely-accessible content is not only compared by the public - it's also aggressively compared by search engines, whose software can assess popularity indicators, substance, relevance, grammatical competence, etc. So writers of freely-accessible content have to compete hard, with their actual article body, if they want the benefits of free publishing.
But with gated content, publishers are resigned to losing most or all of the benefits of free publishing. Their main article body is not trying to compete for search visibility, because the whole point is that no one can see it unless they unlock it.
The competition with gated content lies in the baiting continuum, so that's where the bulk of the effort tends to go. Into the titles, the intros, the “coming nexts…”, etc. The body needs to offer something, but as long as it incorporates teasers, it doesn't need to sell the author's soul in the way that top-ranking free content does.
Of course, the fact that paywalled content is generally of lower quality than the most visible free content is not a reason to ban links to paywalled content. But it is a reason why we should not be aggrieved about the shadowbanning of paywalled and gated links.
"Let's allow the legitimately Free Internet to continue serving its original purpose as a mine of information, by giving it the priority it's always deserved."
WHY SHADOWBAN AND NOT JUST OUTRIGHT BAN PEOPLE FROM POSTING GATED LINKS?
Shadowbanning would allow social posts containing gated links to be served conditionally. For example, to followers of the account sharing the link(s), provided those followers opt in, via a checkbox in their settings, to receiving links to gated content.
Using an opt-in would negate the spam issue, because by nature, if you want to see it, it's not spam. And limiting the visibility to the publishing account's own followers would cut out much of the viral spread through processes like Retweeting and Reply-hijacking. There would still be potential for gated content to be abused in attempts to spread misinformation, because some influencers have huge native followings. But the majority of their followers would not opt into receiving gated links, so the problem would inevitably be reduced.
IS THIS FAIR ON THE PUBLISHERS OF GATED CONTENT?
Indirect methods of promoting paywalled or gated content would be unaffected. A better question would be: is it fair for publishers of gated content to link to it directly from social media in the first place? In 2019, Medium tacitly acknowledged it was poor form when they dropped their gating on direct referrals from Twitter.
If you support hiding content when it advantages you, you can't really complain about other people hiding content when it disadvantages you. You either think that content should be available to all, or you think it's okay to restrict it. If you have a problem with other people hiding content (i.e. your spam), stop hiding content yourself. Take your paywall down and monetise by alternative means.
There's a constant chant from content-capitalists of: "ThE aDvErTiSiNg MoDeL cOlLaPsEd", and it's a lie. Precisely because everyone's now hiding their content, demand for open-access publishers who run ads and paid promotions is actually rising. There are new ad programmes entering the game - one of whom approached me recently. Yes, the advertisers are now coming to you!
And for me, personally, the past year's ad revenue has way outstripped any previous year's. I know we've had lockdowns, but pronounced increase could hardly be considered "collapse". The massive players - Google, Facebook, Microsoft et al - are showing no sign of moving away from the ad model. Do they look like the kind of companies who would continue to pursue something which has "collapsed"? Don't be persuaded that content-capitalists are paywalling because they have no alternative. They chose paywalling. They were never forced.
I know there are people who will say: "But I don't have anywhere to process indirect referrals. My content is incompatible with ad monetisation, and I have no blog or website. Only my locked content and social media." No. I don't accept that there's anyone in the world who is capable of setting up a monetised content stream and payment-processing account, but can't create a simple, openly accessible link and referral page on a free resource.
COULD SOCIAL SITES BE SELECTIVE WITH GATED LINKS, AND ONLY SHADOWBAN THE ONES THAT HAVE POTENTIALLY MISLEADING TITLES?
Why? It's all spam. And other spamming tactics have been zapped on social media with highly positive results. After Twitter launched its first serious attack on spam in 2017, it ran into profit for the first time, soaring from an annual loss of $456 million in 2016 to an annual profit of $1.2 billion by 2018. Shadowbans and spam-blitzes have paid Twitter handsomely, and social media's user experience has shown itself to be critical to healthy revenues. When the user experience improves, profits rise. When it worsens, profits fall.
The nature of spamming on Twitter has changed, and a huge part of the problem today is the absolute deluge of inaccessible linking within Tweets. This is now an epidemic, in a way it was not in 2017. And ultimately, it's not the general public's duty to suffer so that “content creators” and news orgs can incessantly blast timelines with subscription bait.
FREE INTERNET
But we have to be careful not to take the concept of the “Free Internet” to extremes. Creators have a right to control their content, and if they want it behind a paywall, that's their choice. On Twitter there are some suggestions of vigilante-style moves. Calls for the public to breach paywalls and make paid content available elsewhere, for free. That's an abhorrent violation of rights, which is vehemently opposed by the author of this post. It's also a violation of copyright, which can result in litigation for very substantial damages.
Pay no attention to these idiotic suggestions. The Free Internet is millions of times richer in value than any paywalled or gated subscription. We already have access to the best. Let's allow the legitimately Free Internet to continue serving its original purpose as a mine of information, by giving it the priority it's always deserved.