Digital Portfolio, Academic Journal, and Creative Writings
I can’t think of a better connection to illustrate the validity of my previously written article hypothesizing that Trigger Warning staring Killer Mike was Venezuelan propaganda than cultural activist Jesus “Chucho” Garcia holding up a CD of Fela. I wonder, did they ever meet?
This is a pretty dope album to listen to front to back. I get why they dig em.
For the second time this year, the Facebook page operated by TeleSUR English was briefly unpublished. One of TeleSUR’s formal responses during that time was an article rebuking the host of their social media account on the platform of the New York based journal, Jacobin.
In the article “Why Did Facebook Purge TeleSUR English?”, the title an allusion to the popular movie franchise about a day long cessation of legal enforcement against crime, Branko Marcetic commits a number of grave sins against his readers and contains so much irony that it’s worth coining a new literary term, “Orwellian irony”, which I briefly describe in this article but which I go into depth on here.
For one, Branko Marcetic misrepresents the situation in such a way as to leave the reader misinformed of the facts of the matter.
Secondarily, he does not cite the proper precedents that accurately contextualizes the case he describes.
Additionally, he mis-attributes intentions to multiple actors and closes with a call to action that is based on these misunderstandings.
In other words, by close examination of a narrative intended to gain public support for TeleSUR English by claiming his employer has been victimized by a conspiracy, evidence is instead provided as to why it is that Facebook should permanently unpublish TeleSUR English’s Facebook page.
Repeating many of the talking point made in the Jacobin article, the above video shows Adriano Contreras with tape over his mouth — as if he is being prevented from speaking. But framing the issue of their unpublishing as censorship ignores several facts — the most important being the fact that the unpublishing in no way impacted the ability for TeleSUR English to publish content.
Unlike the Palmer Raids in the U.S. at the beginning of the 20th century, no equipment for the production of media was seized or destroyed and no reporters have been jailed. No news facilities were shuttered, as has been the case in Venezuela, and no reporters were attacked by state or para-state actors.
TeleSUR never lost their ability to send out mail, something that American leftists faced in the wake of the Espionage Acts, and neither was their daily email newsletter, nor their website taken down.
During the period of their brief unpublishing TeleSUR English’s web domain and other social media outlets — such as Abby Martin’s The Empire Files or The World Today with Tariq Ali — were able to be shared on Facebook’s social media platform.
If we are to accept Marcetic’s uncommon interpretation of American jurisprudence, Jacobin is similarly guilty of “censorship” should they chose not to publish ads on their website to promote a new edition of The Turner Diaries. However this is not the case as the right to free speech doesn’t mean that someone else is forced to distribute that speech.
It’s worth noting that this is not the first time that TeleSUR has misrepresented Facebook.
In an article following the leak of internal Facebook information, TeleSUR shares more false information about the company.
The issue at hand here is a fundamental misunderstanding of what protectedgroups are. TeleSUR English shifts away from legal terminology to instead talk about privileged groups in order to imply that Facebook is inherently racist. Could a better example have been given to those acting as Facebook censors? Yes, but as you can see from the below, protected groups don’t include drivers or children.
While it’s possible that Marcetic’s upside-down interpretation of the American legal terms and enforcement history relates to his having studied the United States in Australia, the second misreading of legal context hints at something more purposeful.
In the numerous defenses of TeleSUR English following their unpublishing, Frank Marcetic, Abby Martin and others ignore the fact that that prior to being granted access to the Facebook platform, users must agree to its terms and conditions.
This isn’t unique to Facebook, but goes across all social media publishing platforms as well as the news publishing industry. Letters to the editor in newspapers are vetted and sometimes edited before publication, just as articles written by paid staff members are fact-checked for quality assurance. Academic journals will send back original research for any number of reasons and similarly many Facebook groups have rules for posting that will lead to those violating them getting removed from the group.
The current director of TeleSUR English’s operations, Orlando Perez, has previously defended the rights of a publisher to set editorial guidelines that determines whether or not an article is published. He even stated that it was sensible to cease business relations with an author for attempting to make a public scandal of the incident.
Had the unpublishing of TeleSUR English been part of a large scale “purge” of leftist perspectives then we could accurately describe that event as censorship. But that didn’t happen, which then begs the question: if TeleSUR English wasn’t unpublished for it’s content, then why was it?
It’s at this point in their reporting on the issues that Branko Marcetic; TeleSUR reporter Abby Martin; comedian Jimmy Dore; and news commentators, such as Ben Swann and Caitlin Johnstone, all do something worse than merely misrepresenting the context of the news — they fail to examine the evidence.
Even worse than making no attempt to research why Facebook would unpublish TeleSUR English based on the statement provided to them, these “journalists” rely on the words of a TeleSUR employee who has not worked there in several months, Pablo Vivanco, to validate their view that this was censorship.
Let’s examine the evidence and see how it is that Facebook may have been correct in unpublishing TeleSUR English.
Pablo Vivanco’s use as a source in this matter is another example of Orwellian irony — for it was his assigning or purchasing of marketing services to artificially boost follower and engagement numbers that likely lead to TeleSUR English being unpublished.
Google the name of the former Director of TeleSUR English — Pablo Vivanco — and you will learn that in contrast to his statement to RT on August 14th of this year, former TeleSUR English Director Pablo Vivanco admitted that he did this at the 2016 Building Left Media in the Digital Commons panel at Left Forum.
This fact was repeated in several interviews I’ve conducted with current and former TeleSUR English employees over the past year, who also stated that this practice was known about throughout the organization and that Vivanco’s former assistant, Cyril Mychalejko, helped direct it.
Though Pablo Vivanco implies that they stopped doing this in his official statement, had any of these “journalists” done any investigation they would have learned the real truth of the matter and come to a much different conclusion.
Though current and former TeleSUR employees and contractors, like Branko Marcetic and Abby Martin, quote Pablo Vivanco as evidence as to why it is that Facebook’s unpublishing is censorship, a review of his personal profile provides evidence as to why it is that Facebook’s algorithm unpublished the account.
If one reviews Facebook’s Terms of Service, it immediately becomes apparent that Pablo Vivanco is not being honest when he states that there is no reason to have been unpublished.
Clearly TeleSUR English has violated Terms of Service.
Pablo Vivanco is not, however, alone in violating or directing the violation of Facebook terms of service. In the wake of the first unpublishing, a new TeleSUR English related account was created called TeleSUR English Aggregate.
While I was not able to obtain the name of the person running the account from speaking with them, their actions speak for themselves.
During my interview with admin of the TeleSUR Aggregate account, he openly admitted that the sole purpose of the account was to promote their content.
When I asked him why he did this, he gave me a pretty clear answer why he was doing this: he wanted to disrupt the operation of Facebook.
It’s not just the purchasing of likes, which helped get TeleSUR English to its roughly half a million likes that lead to it’s unpublishing, nor was it solely the TeleSUR Play and TeleSUR Aggregate accounts — whose sole purpose is to repost TeleSUR English content.
The false profiles obtained by Pablo Vivanco have done far more than just “liked” TeleSUR English’s profile — they also continue to artificially boost it’s engagement numbers.
If you go look through the public comments, likes, and reposts of TeleSUR English’s content — you will uncover hundreds of Facebook accounts that rarely have photos, and often have only a small number of friends, but are characterized by a large amount of user activity which consists entirely of re-posting news.
Unsurprisingly, given the media agreement between the Russian and Venezuelan state media, they also re-post content from RT and Sputnik.
Suggesting a mix of accounts that are directly controlled and others that are operated by 3rd parties, a number of them also post on behalf of various companies — such as GreenMedInfo.com.
In order to artificially inflate the reach of TeleSUR English, bad actors on Facebook aren’t limited to automated accounts but include coordinated behaviors by a large number of individuals.
There are over 30 “Friends who like TeleSUR English” Facebook groups. What their function is given the above evidence, I can’t clearly say.
I messaged all the administrators of these groups in February of 2018 and only recieved two responses, one from someone in Africa and one from someone in India. Both denied being an admin, even though they were clearly listed, and neither would respond to my questions
Some of these groups are moderated by employees of the Venezuelan government, like the one above. Others by Cubans. One is moderated by Vlaudin Vega, an individual formerly on the U.S. State Department’s terrorist watch list for association with the FARC. The vast majority of these have not been active in years.
What I can say that they do is to re-publish content into public groups, in order to make the content seem more valuable in Facebook’s algorithm.
Just as algorithms can help prevent forest fires, help serial killers get caught, or suggest your next purchase based on your past ones, algorithms are also able to identify a large number of accounts that are spamming the system to drive traffic and increase page rankings.
While this type of marketing effort can lead to big increases in follower numbers, such behavior is prohibited by all the social media platforms as it degrades the user experience.
The reason that many leftist media outlets saw a drop in Google ranking and traffic being directed to their websites and why they posts have been deprioritized in Facebook feeds has nothing to do with selective targeting of companies or political viewpoints and everything to do with Facebook and Google holistically discouraging black hat marketing practices.
In their quest to create greater domain authority, media organizations all over the political spectrum as well as businesses bought followers from companies or created their own portfolios of sock-puppet accounts. They joined back-linking networks and compensated others to engage in practices designed to amplify the appearance of trustworthiness according to what the algorithms searched for and valued.
And then they got penalized for it and for other reasons.
Lest this seem overly abstract, let me give some examples that feature links to TeleSUR English content.
By name alone Los Angeles Post sounds like it could be a credible outlet, but the small number of followers and the lack of postings over the past 8 months suggests otherwise.
Viewing their website you’ll learn that there are similarly few current news articles listed on their landing page, which also hints at this being merely a means for marketing companies to monetize companies desires for backlinks.
Looking through their back pages, however, you’ll see a large number of links going to TeleSUR English, CounterPunch, MintPressNews and other “alternative news” websites.
Another page which does this is called Russia is not the Enemy. Unlike LA Post, they do not pretend to be a news site — but are simply a news aggregate website that posts RT, TeleSUR, CounterPunch, etc.
Another example of such a backlinking scheme, but with actual operators, is Geopolitics Alert. Their Facebook page lists 36,700+ people liking it, however the journalistic pair that makes up this “Media/News Company” has only five Patrons and under 50 listens to their SoundCloud Account.
I emailed co-founder Jim Carey to ask him if he has accepted marketing services or money from TeleSUR, which is sensible as almost a quarter of the content on their website is directly from TeleSUR English, and he denied this.
When asked the same question as to his relationship with other state or private media organizations, Carey refused to answer my questions.
Websites like these, which claim to be funded by donations given the paucity of income they get from that means, have links to thousands of new backlinks to leftist news sites such as TeleSUR English and CounterPunch.
Just as there is a difference between censorship and a Facebook page being unpublished due to non-adherence to terms and conditions, so too is there a difference between a conspiracy to silence leftist media and the effects of algorithmic updates that seek to holistically counter the actions of bad agents. Facebook has had to delete millions of such accounts.
The notion that those with capital to pay the fees for partnership with such networks shouldn’t be given an advantage is not an “anti-democratic” decision, but one that encourages democracy. This is why Facebook and Google have changed their ranking system, and since this is clearly stated on their website and in the press Branko Marcetic, Abby Martin and others statements is not an act of courageous truth-telling but an attempt to deflect the truth that groups such as DFR Labs are trying to uncover. Rather than examining what it is such groups do to inform their readers, they hint at global conspiracies.
Doing so they ignore the fact that to operationalize the functioning of their internet platforms in such a way that it is more open, democratic, enjoyed by their users and not a source for marketing spam or disinformation campaigns from bad actors working on behalf of foreign governments — algorithms need constant refinement.
I posted an earlier version of this article in the only Friends of TeleSUR English group that had any recent postings. Moderated by Arnold August, a journalist and political scientist with a specialization on Cuba, I was hoping to better understand the perspective of the “Friends who like TeleSUR English” given the above evidence. Given that I was previously blocked on Twitter and Facebook by Vice Director of TeleSUR Orlando Perez and former Director of TeleSUR English Pablo Vivanco after asking them to explain as well, I can’t say that I was shocked by what transpired next.
First it was suggested that I was committing slander. Then it was implied that I had received help from “unnamed sources”. Then Nicolaj Leonardo — a writer for RT and TeleSUR English, posted a photoshopped photo of me with a knife, and then I was banned from the group.
This is not what democracy looks like.
To be clear, I do not now nor have I ever worked or consulted for Facebook, the Atlantic Council, the Digital Forensics Research Lab or any other of organization and the only “help” that I’ve recieved in my research is in the form of information given to me by current and former TeleSUR English employees.
I am a graduate of NYU’s Masters program in the Experimental Humanities, a Doctoral candidate at Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana in their program for Innovation and Technology Management that has also worked in digital marketing for several years and the project leader of a team of researchers answering the call for research by Social Science One to depict the relationship between social media, democracy and elections.
Women have played a large role in Leftist revolutionary movements. According to Mao, they hold up half the sky. After yet after reading this report and viewing the media content pulled from Facebook you’ll learn that while TeleSUR’s officially stated position is for women’s liberation, their full network behavior shows that they replicate the same patterns of objectification and sexualization of women that they claim is cause for their moral superiority.
Going beyond sharing photos of attractive socialist women, their own channel and those of their partners share soft-core pornography; photos stylized like those of prostitutes (prepagos) as well as sharing imagines that would appeal to pedophiles. Given these facts, a more appropriate slogan for TeleSUR than “Our North is The South”, at least for its female audience, might be ‘Liberation up Front; Commodification in the Back’. An especially appropriate analogy, given that the mullet is also an animal and what follows is fishy.
“Sex sells”, those in the room deciding TeleSUR’s media strategy say amongst themselves, “so if the photo of a pretty girl is what gets someone to become interested in getting involved or expressing solidarity with their struggles then so be it!”
The right image hints that it was the power of camiseta-liberated women that was the sole cause for the passage of the bill. If you want to help The Cause, whatever that is, you need to take off your shirt.
If “Telesur’s new Lifestyle section” seems odd in it’s clear appeal to a female teenage audience it’s important to remember that this tactic was similarly documented in the form of FaceMusic byDigital Forensic Research Labs’ analysis of Russian media influence tactics.
There are whole websites devoted to hosting photos of Conservative American girls with guns. Kaitlin Bennett, a pro-Second Amendment supporter and Grassroots Director for Liberty Hangout made the newsfor a photo shoot at Kent State.
According to the Handbook of Clinical Sexuality for Mental Health Professionals the technical name for high levels of sexual arousal for seeing one’s preferred gender with a gun is called Hoplophilia.
The first photo, Che’s Revolutionary Devotees, with the head coverage of the women and the eyes focal point being off in the distance seem to indicate that the women had a religious devotions to the thought and life of Che Guevara. Like modern apostles, the photo suggests, the FARC is the true heir of Che just like that Catholic Church first claimed of Jesus.
Guns out Fun Bags Out is of a style that was very popular amongst the CPI(M) accounts. Other variations of it had similar images but with bright pastels.
The Widows of Gaucho refers to the dissident FARC commander that was killed 21 de Diciembre de 2018, en Tumaco. The account which shared it, which for a profile photo has a picture of Correa, not so subtly hints that though dying young he had a sexually prolific life.
Before moving to Colombia I was not familiar with post-social media prepago culture in Latin America. Young women that want to sell their sexual services no longer have to congregate in Zonas Rosa (Red districts) or Zonas de Tolerencia (Tolerance Zones) in order to find patrons.
Given that a number of the mobile phone plans operators in Latin America, such as Tigo, Claro, etc. don’t include use of Facebook as part of their data plans — thus making it free — this sort of dissemination of semi-nude photos is a manner for such girls to showcase their wares.
Apparently it has also become a manner to keep Chavistas interested in checking the media sent by the accounts that spread TeleSUR’s content and that of their partners.
“By any means necessary” is common revolutionary slogan indicating that the successful results of a revolutionary movement matters more than the manner in which it is achieved. Revolutionaries following this principle can thus excuse all sorts of behaviors that, were their enemy doing it to them, would be considered yet another justification for The Cause.
In promoting these kind of images, like those above, TeleSUR and their coordinated inauthentic behavior network are sexualizing young girls. Any sort of excuse that it is about “showing that children are keen to save the future” is a lie as (1) there were no similar images posted of young boys; (2) there was no similarly posted photos of groups of children engaging in some sort of collective activity — as was typical of Soviet propaganda employing children; and (3) the very notion of a child endorsing a political party or movement is absurd as they be definition are wholly ignorant of the world.
Furthermore, let me contextualize the images according to it’s culture and country of origin.
In India a child under the age of 16 is raped every 15 minutes.
In Gaza, according to a trauma therapist working for Physicians for Human Rights “more than one-third of the children I saw in the Jabalya [refugee] camp reported being sexually abused. Children from ages 5 to 13.”
In Russia and Ukraine, laws and cultural norms against reporting make statistics like the above difficult to find. Worth nothing, however, is that after Ukrainian journalist Nastya Melnychenko, recounted a number of incidents of sexual harassment and violence that started when she was six years old and continuing into adulthood on social media with the hashtag #Iamnotscaredtospeak — many thousands of others expressed similar stories.
The images of pre-pubescent girls which appeal to pedophiles are all the more disturbing considering other aspects of TeleSUR’s coordinated inauthentic behavior network. Specifically that they occur at the same time that articles in Teen Vogue addressing the finer points of modern Socialist thought features frequent PSUV-spokesperson George Ciccariello-Maher.
Given the clear message illustrated in the images of the socialist women that are of age that there is imperative to submit to the needs of The Revolution and the men that run it — it begs the question if there is a concerted effort by TeleSUR/Venezuela to groom pre-teen young American girls to find Socialist men appealing and imbue the notion that they should sacrifice themselves in any way needed.
This is a classic characteristic of sex cults that exploit children — equating touching with love and devotion to the leaders of the group.
If we are to believe, as Rosa Luxemburg did, that “the most revolutionary thing one can do is always proclaim loudly what is happen” then TeleSUR claims it has to offer is either to be sex objects or warriors — nothing more.
Whose Truth? Sovereignty, Disinformation and Winning the Battle of Trust by John T Watts presents an overview of the social of the current media landscape basedonn themes and insights garnered from the 2018 Sovereign Challenge Conference. The article is interesting not only because it showcases how it is that disinformation can have a negative impact on the way in which societies function, but also as it is in part a strong criticism of the incentives and key performance indicators of the current media environment in general. I’m going to review how the internet has changed the habits and incentivizes of stakeholders, and then relate this to the general political concerns that are the primary focus of Watts’ article. Also, for clarification, when I speak of news in this review I’m speaking of political news and not entertainment news, sports news, etc.
The erosion of professionalism in the online media space is not just a concern of Watts, but one voiced by literally every media analyst that I’ve read over the past several years. Having worked several years as a digital marketer, and as someone that’s heard fake news content sent via email chains and social media posts make their way into people’s conversations on and offline as well as their systems of belief – I find the trend to be a significant one to be wary of. People mistaking the name Nostradamus for Quasimoto because of Notre Dame is one thing, but people believing patently false information leads can lead to a low level of aversion to political involvement or high level reactions to fake stories that involve targeted murders of people – as demonstrated by a number of recent mass shootings. While these types of lies, misinformation, disinformation and outright propaganda are most prevalent on non-institutional web pages without the same pressures to maintain high publishing standards, the legacy news outlets have been affected pressures caused by the internet and new consumption habits as well.
One way of lowering costs to deal with declining sales and advertisements has been to decrease the number of professionals hired to vet stories or content at the same time that the amount of content produced and distributed is increased. This need to produce ever more content to compete with other news producers leads to a sort of race to the bottom. As trained journalists are expensive, those without appropriate training or professional adherence to specific standards take their place. Because of the “never finished” nature of a website – unlike print, it can be quickly amended with corrections – any errors discovered can be amended AFTER publication. Additionally, computer programs that have been fed learning material to read and rephrase other outlets news – like the Washington Post Bot the did just this – also helps with the increasing amount of news that is now being published without the going through the previously existent gatekeeper/editorial process.
The leftist media scholar Jodi Dean describes how this dynamic related to the political her article Communicative Captialsim: Circulation and Foreclosure of Politicsas such: “with the commodification of communication, more and more domains of life seem to have been reformatted in terms of market and spectacle. Bluntly put, the standards of a finance- and consumption-driven entertainment culture set the very terms of democratic governance today.”
Watts’ suggestion is to be both honest and hold news outlets and platforms more accountable:
“Advertisers would get greater return on investment if their message was attached to better quality material that properly engages the reader. Their brand can also suffer harm if it is associated with poor quality or misleading material. By demanding that their advertising is proven to be associated with high quality material, they will eventually realign some of the market forces and shift the incentives of the producers.”
This is not all that can be accomplished without veering into the delegation of increased powers for the state to regulate of the media, media platforms or the internet in general. Platforms themselves, like Facebook and Twitter, can start to place a greater enforce on enforcing their community standards. This has been seen of late in the wake of people spreading false news and hate speech as well as coordinated efforts of ideologically motivated actors to behave in such a way as to “hijack” the algorithm which decides to place content in people’s feed.
The internet is incredibly impressive for enabling individuals to find others with specific, niche, and in some cases fringe, interests and beliefs. Because of this, a multitude of internet enabled subcultures has developed, while already established ones grew larger. In many ways this is a positive as it grants people the ability to find those with similar affinities and engage with those digitally. However online subcultures also create “echo chambers where views are validated and reinforced, and individuals are incentivized within those subcultures to develop and amplify the core beliefs of the group” (Watts). After the recent shooting in Pittsburg, for example, I looked through a number of Facebook groups and I would normally never read and was frankly shocked by the hateful rhetoric in there. When I attempted to engage them, rather than any sort of genuine engagement with these people the discourse devolved to name calling, something I’d not experienced since middle school, and antisemitic comments.
The political concerns related to this are multitudinous. For a business enterprise one is how high profile cases could result in fees or penalties. Legal liability for activity that occurs as a result of such platforms at this point is low risk given the U.S. regulatory environment, however given European legislation it’s possible that this might happen in that United States as well – which would thus mandate that another layer of coders and censors seek to ensure that they are not subject to whatever the penalties associated with regulatory violations.
It’s because of this that after reading Watt’s article, it’s hard not to see that those who express alarm over this essay, such as Andre Damon, and about several Facebook Pages being unpublished not as reporters but as ideologues presenting a caricature of reality. For one, they ignore the legal context in which Facebook operates. Secondly, they write primarily on behalf of news institutions that have been breaking the terms and conditions of Facebook, Google and Twitter; have a prior working relationship with such organizations; or have an ideological affinity to such a degree that they refrain from a thorough investigation of the matter.
An issue of greater concern is how this new informational medium could potentially be exploited by para-state and state actors in order to suit their strategic geo-political plans. In the news there’s been an increasing number of cases of emotionally unstable individuals either self-radicalizing or coming under the influence of others to commit acts. Furthermore, misinformation affects many other patterns of thought and behavior – and while a certain receptivity to such thoughts is an obvious precondition to adoption – informational warfare is real.
One of the conclusions Watts makes is that in this age of informational, hybrid warfare it is important for the corrective solutions not to inadvertently feed into the narratives of would-be disruptive actors. Given that a permanent monitor of such behavior would be costly and perhaps send the wrong message to users, this is why Facebook has opened up awards for those that find them. I think this is a great message as it serves to show the power of community self-regulation. There’s a lot more to say about details and examples – but I think as Watts’ report is worth reading I’ll more or less end it here.
In closing, I’ll share a not so minor criticism that I have of Watts report: the poor operationalization of American’s trust towards businesses and government. Watts defines this solely as evidenced within the Edelman Trust Barometer and doesn’t provide any greater historical context – which is a problem. While Watts rightly argues that a shared interpretation of reality is one of the glues of a social order the changing perception of a social order should be contextualized. Ascribing the declining lack of trust to “generational aspects”, he ignores a number of major newsworthy, historical events, how it was that Americans experienced and thus interpreted them.
For example, there is the fact that Americans were sold a patently false narrative in the wake of 9/11 by the highest level of governance to initiate the war in Iraq that has cost trillions of dollars and the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Then there is 2008 financial crisis, which was caused by the adoption of the financial industry’s proposed regulatory changes; an underfunded and lax regulatory government apparatus; and widespread fraud that resulted in millions of Americans losing their savings yet no major criminal charges being filed against those that were involved. These are just two of many examples as to why a decline in the trust for such private enterprise and public office in general could occur – yet in Watts assessment of shifting views, they don’t get even a passing mention.
Winning the battle of trust requires honesty and transparency if it is to be a genuine win, and not merely a change of perception. An enlightened citizenry ought not to presume the offices of elected representatives or corporate board rooms are working in their interests. Though just personal anecdotes to illustrate this point, I can think of several teachers that have expressed to me that they were delaying retirement but at least three years in order to try to make up the money that was lost as a result of the financial crash. A significant number of American students that I’ve spoken have correctly pointed out that were it not for the money spent on wars in the Middle East that universal health care and federally subsidized college for all would not sound like Utopian ideals that merit pillorying by the Council of Economic Advisors.
Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming Obstacles Between Vision and Reality by Scott Belsky, productivity expert and founder and CEO of Behance, is a guide to developing execution skills on an individual and organizational level. The book is in large part about how to use design principles to organize projects. While PMP is the standard for approaching project management in the United States, the reality is that often times the smaller scope of projects for companies with under 50 workers and start-ups don’t require someone with this specialization. Furthermore, the reality is that creative environments are no conducive to such organizational demands for specific procedures, restrictions and processes. The creative worker’s generalized rebellion against these is part of their recognition that there is no one best process for developing ideas. This does not, however, mean that chaos should reign but that other methods must be developed.
The book begins with a discussion of the Action Method, which is a set of general principles and means for organizing workflow such that there is a bias towards action rather than reaction. According to Belsky: “The state of reactionary workflow occurs when you get stuck simply reacting to whatever flows into the top of an inbox. Instead of focusing on what is most important and actionable you spend too much time just trying to stay afloat. Reactionary workflow prevents you from being more proactive with your energy. The act of processing requires discipline and imposing some blockages around your focus.”
In order to prevent this, he provides a number of techniques – such as breaking processes into elementary, actionable steps; maintaining a backburner of low-priority items; and keeping up a daily practice of journaling to ensure that there is as little as possible that is interiorized and thus likely to be forgotten about or causing sub-optimal work due to stress.
There are a large number of actionable insights from the first third of the book as it relates to personal workspace within a company as well as hiring and managerial practices. Some of the takeaways can be summarized as such:
The second part of the book focuses on the social, community elements within which creative enterprises occurs. The section on Dreamers, Doers and Incrementalist posits that there are three archetypes for those within the creative business world. The Dreamer is the one that is full of ideas and able to come up with solutions from a wide range of knowledge. These are the people that relish in ideas, but have trouble managing clients, staying organized or accountable, etc. The Doer is the inverse of this. They are able to help Dreamers translate the ideas through a series of specific processes and steps, as well as ensuring that the stakeholders are informed of what is going on and that the bills are paid. Belsky cites a number of famous businesses where such pairs were able to lead their companies to great success. Tim Cook & Steve Jobs of Apple; Bill Bowerman and Phil Knight of Nike; Barry Schwarz and Calvin Klein are some examples of these. The Incrementalist archetype is the combination of Dreamer and Doers. These are rare people that because of their independent attitude and capabilities must learn to work together – as the Doers and Dreamers seem naturally inclined to do – lest their projects falter due to being overwhelmed by the fact that they don’t trust other enough to help them.
The third part of the book covers how to be a respected and effective leader of creative teams.
Incorporating fun into projects whenever possible to keep minds fresh is one of the many pieces of advice that he gives. Citing his interview with Ji Lee, the creative director of Google’s Creative Lab, he illustrates how it is that a number of his personal projects have seen themselves applied in various ways into the professional field – which explains why it is that the company famously allows for 20% of the projects worked on by their workers to be personal projects. After an excessive focus on trying to solve problems, after all, an intellectual plateau can be reached – which is damaging to a creative enterprise.
Additional insight includes picking an appropriately balanced creative team. While it’s understandable that those with a “creative background” would be chosen, the variety of insights gained from having informed perspectives that are vastly different in their composition is also important. This is also why it’s suggested to involved potential end-users of products and services into the development process – something which many companies’s now practice.
Sharing appreciation is also important for managers. Most of the creative workers surveyed cite their rationale for departing a particular enterprise as stemming from a poor work environment wherein compliments towards good work is rare. Belsky cites an instance of going to a storytelling workshop in order to see how it is that merely focusing on the positives within a first edit/prototype story can lead to changes that are encouraging rather than covertly critical.
The section on self-leadership I found to be particularly engaging. In my interactions with a number of team leaders, I’ve frequently seen people acting in emotionally detached, mechanistic manner. Many of them did not seem to have psychologically developed themselves enough to direct their emotions as it relates to work situations in a positive manner, and so did not make the sort of decisions or communicate in a manner with their employees such that it garnered respect and confidence in them.
It wasn’t until I started to do background research for this Ciudadano TeleSUR that I realized that I’m a little late to the party when it comes to making this a talking point. Caracas Chronicles wrote an article about Ciudadano TeleSUR shortly before the 10th anniversary of TeleSUR’s founding, April 17th, 2016.
His article goes into the some of the background of Argentinean President Mauricio Macri ceasing to financially support of TeleSUR and TeleSUR English and how it’s effecting morale there. This article deals with something else entirely and to be frank I think the author, Gustavo Hernandez, missed the mark on what was important about the video and the project. That’s understandable, however, as my concern is with the interconnection between aesthetics, politics and technics.
You can watch the video of Patricia Villegas making an appeal for money above, or quickly read the subtitles, in the original Spanish or in the English, below.
Spanish Subtitles
Telesur nació como una alternative informativa independiente dispuesta a comunicar lo que otros no quieren o multimedia y responsable con corresponsales en todo el mundo.
Hoy la misión de telesur está en riesgo hay gobernantes que no quieren escuchar la voz de nuestros pueblos.
Por razones políticas económicas prefieren callamos igual que los medios hegemónicos que responden a los intereses de las grandes corporaciones frente a las adversidades de su responde con la verdad con más participación y más democracia.
Por eso te invitamos a convertirse en un ciudadano de origen con su aporte continuaremos ofreciendo de las herramientas para que puedan discerner reclamar y construir todo lo recaudado será recortado transparentemente y conocerás lo que hemos logrado. Con su petición porque estar informado es tu derecho no un negocio de Telesur estamos comprometidos contigo y con la verdad y gracias a su colaboración seguiremos siendo la señal informativa de América.
English Translation
Telesur was born as an independent information alternative willing to communicate what others do not want or multimedia and responsible with correspondents around the world today
The mission of TeleSUR is at risk. There are rulers who do not want to hear the voice of our people.
Economic political reasons. They prefer to remain silent as the hegemonic media that respond to the interests of large corporations in the face of the adversities of their response with the truth with more participation and more democracy.
That is why we invite you to become a citizen supporter. With your contribution we will continue offering the tools so that they can discern claim and build all the proceeds will be cut transparently and you will know what we have achieved with your request because being informed is your right not a telesur business
We are committed to you and to the truth. Thanks to your collaboration we will continue being the informative signal of America
I’ve When I heard Patricia Villegas of TeleSUR say that someone could simply give money and
English Translation
Good morning Ariel,
Unfortunately this campaign did not have the expected response so it is no longer in circulation. We appreciate your interest but we are not receiving affiliations to Telesur Citizens.
Best regards,
Helga
I think it’s interesting to note that Helga’s response has does not answer the question that I asked: “what have previous donations paid for” nor does it even address it. Instead she tells me that the program is no longer on-going – which is unusual considering that the website is still up.
English Translation
Helga,
I’m sorry to hear that the campaign did not have the expected response. The mission of TeleSUR is good and something that I support.
Even though this program ended, I’m still curious about the transparency Patricia refers to in the video.
Could you provide me with the information you mention that is available upon request about the achievements of TeleSUR?
Thank you,
Ariel Sheen
After not receiving a response to this, I sent another query on March 7th.
After not receiving a response to my March 7th query, I sent one last one on March 9th, this time including questions related to the “benefits” that one was supposed to receive if they donated.
In English, the benefits are:
• Mailed a TeleSUR newsletter.
• Card that accredits you as a Citizen teleSUR.
• Invitation to special events when they take place in your city.
• Those who gett five friends to donate, will receive a flannel, T-shirt as special recognition.
• News about programming in advance.
As a result of this exchange, I have so many questions, like
When Did Ciudadano TeleSUR End?!
Looking at the the most recent tweets it hasn’t been something that has been promoted in over a year and a half. So why was there still a subheader on the TeleSUR ENglish website for it that was still functional?!
This and what I talk about below really gets me thinking…
Hard to say since they won’t provide:
Contrast the transparency show here with this other funding drive for reporters. Here’s a link to the IndieGoGo page, and for when that’s taken down here’s a web archive file.
Below you can clearly see indications of all of the above.
Why is it that TeleSUR and TeleSUR English won’t be transparent about this information?
Ciudadano teleSUR? More like Ten Cuidado Con Telesur.
I contacted all of these people and not a single one responded.
That’s all I really have to say about that.
Dan Luttrel is an interesting character.
Not only does Dan repost an incredibly large amount of links from TeleSUR, RT, and other left-of-center news outlets – but none of his friends or family comments on it nor does he respond to Facebook messages.
Besides the photos of people with the above, there’s also a number of profiles that like and share TeleSUR content without any profiles and only with a few “friend” connections.
Some of these sock puppet profiles even list Instagram accounts which, perhaps unsurprisingly, don’t have any posts.
As a concept it’s understandable why mobiles apps would be appealing to a newly minted media company. It provides status, stature, clout, cachet.
It seems intuitively sensible too, considering that Latin America and North America both have high smartphone adoption rates.
But such a perspective, however, is fundamentally flawed.
For one it shows ignorance of people’s reading habits for reading the news. It shows that no one took the time to do the proper research one should to determine whether or not these apps are cost-effective means of spreading TeleSUR and TeleSUR English content.
It’s an unfortunate truth that many people will often rate a product or service positively or poorly in relation to their particular worldview. My research into Amazon book reviews about Venezeula shows the Right doing it, and here, in these Android comments we see the “Left” doing it.
I didn’t make any comparisons between TeleSUR’s apps and RT’s, BBC’s, or Al Jazeera as really, it just makes TeleSUR look bad. TeleSUR and TeleSUR English’s download from Android are in the thousands while there’s are all in the hundreds of thousands and millions.
Plus, I have doubts that the numbers of downloads for them are likely inflated. I certainly could be wrong, but when looking at people commenting towards their ratings of TeleSUR’s apps I noticed something strange.
I’ve copied below screenshots of the rather unusual names and online traces of two of the many seemingly fake reviews.
While it may seem that this could be that these people, and several other names that write out reviews, are really just -so- happen to make comment in praise of TeleSUR and then also have random comments on random websites and broken business websites. Or maybe they’re digital ghosts designed to falsely bolster the appearance that TeleSUR’s app are actually worth downloading. I don’t know – none of the people that I found to have Facebook profiles have responded to me yet. That said, it is interesting to note in the above the Russian connection.
Many considerations go into the cost of an app. A barebones app ranges from $75,000 to $125,000. The median cost is $270,000 Though some can go much higher.
Having downloaded, tested and been completely underwhelmed by TeleSUR’s apps, I would imagine that they cost around $100,000.
I say underwhelmed as these are totally unnecessary were they to spend money on optimizing their mobile website rather than making these. As can be seen by the number of downloads and users, there is a high cost to user ratio. And the initial costs don’t even count all of the money wasted on making apps.
Apps are kind of like pets, once you have them you need to take care of them until end of life.
These costs are not fixed and vary due to the complexity of the app’s features, if any, as well as the changes made with each iOS or Android update, as well as if the developers are the same as the one which first created it or if new coders are used.
The above cost of maintenance for apps data comes from this article by Clutch, which surveyed 102 app development companies to determine the cost of building and maintaining a mobile app.
The Android permission system is qualitatively different from the iOS one. The latter is reviewed by Apple teams and they approve or disprove apps from being transmitted via the app store according to appropriate criteria. For Android, no such gatekeeper exists and the users decide themselves.
What does TeleSUR’s particular requests mean?
Well according to Android’s guide for Developers, it means that an application can read/write to the entire contents of your phone’s sdcard.
99.9% of the time this is so the application can do things like save data to the sdcard. For example this could be images from wallpaper app, or if the app is used to backup your sms messages for you, or even a podcast app needs to save the mp3 file to the sdcard.
If the app is just to provide news, why does it need to have access to every file on the system? Why should I give TeleSUR access to private pictures, personal messages, contact information and other data on my device just to get headlines that I could just as easily obtain from their website?
It’s not my claim that they are currently or once were using the app as a means of gathering extensive information about those that used it – but it’s worth bringing up why they felt they make such a request of those wishing to use it.
If you don’t trust an application to install it on your PC, you wouldn’t install it. You should use the same thoughts with your Phone, but keep in mind that you may have even more personal information on the Phone then you would on your PC.
When it comes to favoring news outlets loyalty to particular outlets, just like brands, is dead. Why go through a whole website if you really just want to know about a particular story in a particular place?
Flipbook recognized this early on and now has over 100 million monthly users. One of which is myself. Intersting to note is that those, 100,000,000 only 112 follow TeleSUR English.
For those that are into math, that means that’s .00000112% of Flipbook’s users.
The number of people that follow their magazine channels?
Well, I imagine that 35 is the same number of people that have on staff in Quito producing and distributing their digital media…
My question now is such: Who were those people that were in the room making the decision to make the apps? And are they still working there? Cause if so, they shouldn’t be.
Shortly after starting at my last medium size marketing agency job I had the pleasure of hearing Alberto Cairo give a presentation on Infographics. He helped take what then was a passing interest in infographics into a full-blown passion.
After the talk, I immediately bought and read his books The Functional Art: An Introduction to Information Graphics and Visualization and The Truthful Art: Data, Charts, and Maps for Communication. Both were incredibly well written, profoundly insightful, filled with useful examples and case studies of what to do and what not to do and generally helped instill in me a passion for visualizing data.
My appetite not yet whetted, I then bought and studied the 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016 volumes of The Best American Infographics and signed up to mailers like Information is Beautiful and started reading.
Why the fascination? Simply put, infographics and other means for visualizing data are incredibly useful means for organizing and presenting information that otherwise takes many paragraphs or pages.
Well. Better put, they can be.
After all, all Bugatti Chiron’s are cars, but not all cars are Bugatti Chirons.
When it comes to TeleSUR English’s Infographics not only do they lack any Bugattis in the line up of work they’ve produced, but most of their infographics are better classified as jalopies, scrap metal, or cardboard boxes.
Lest it appear that I’m overly harsh, I’ll review a few examples of the many infographics that have major issues in truthfulness and aesthetics.
This infographic, a term I clearly use loosely here because it’s really just a visual news release poorly conceived and executed, amuses me for a number of reasons.
I took a screenshot of this “infographic” to point out how several people that viewed it believed it to be the incorrect date listed on there and thus felt that it reduced their credibility as a news organization.
In TeleSUR English’s defense, this is an understandable mistake.
I’ve worked with enough graphic designers from Latin America to know that this is a typical error when producing based on designs for an American audience.
Similar errors include applying metric measurements, using comma’s instead of periods to indicate decimals and writing “Jaja” instead of “Haha”.
What’s makes this doubly funny is that even then, the date is still wrong.
You can check this on Reuters as well as Greg Wilpert’s Venezuela Analysis.
In addition to these issues, you’ll notice after every period in the list that there is a hyphen.
1. –
2.-
3. –
Why? A full stop has been indicated, so there’s no need for a dash. It’s distracting and unnecessary.
In the places where the copy is gramatically correct, which is few and far between, the word choice doesn’t make sense. The writer of the copy clearly had English as a second language, which is fine, but the editor that approved publication should have checked it first.
4 +10 +8 +12+ 26 +12+50= 122, not 185.
TeleSUR English’s Infographic is incorrect, though their source – Global Witness – is not only clear that this number is worldwide, but they also present the data in a far superior manner.
Clicking on the link above or exploring the map below demonstrated far superior means for displaying that data that does not lose credibility because they can’t do simple math.
Besides the fact that the infographic is ugly – all of those people they show on there provide don’t assist in interpreting or understanding what is being depicted, but hampers quick interpretation. Then there’s the fact that they miscategorize the Massacre at Wounded Kneww as a “mass shooting” instead of an act of genocide. Futhermore, the one percent figure that’s on there, “31% of mass shootings happen in the US” isn’t contextualized. What they should be including is this in relation to the world’s population – which the United States makes up ~5% of.
Oh, and then there’s the fact that their research didn’t include a number of other mass shooting that other news outlets research teams discovered.
I found this particular infographic to be interesting, though not in a good way.
The first thing that stuck out to me on this – besides the garish blue and red color scheme – was the many percentages.
The five-second rule applies both to food that has fallen on the floor as well as to infographics. Perhaps a small percentage of people can determine what 3.7% is of 58 million, but all would agree that it’d be much easier if this particular number was just placed on the infographic.
Seeing the source, however, was the second thing. See that I knew immediately that not only was this infographic ugly, but that it was stupid. How so? Cause Pew Research understands data and how to visualize it.
In the TeleSUR English iteration, the Latinos just drop into the middle of the United States. Why visualize it that way when you can get even more gradient like the above? Whoever researched for this infographic must have seen it to get the data, but apparently didn’t think to mention to anyone at TeleSUR English that there was a better way of showing it there.
Putting aside the fact that on the same page that lists the data used for this infographic and a few others connected to Pew Research’s report, the data exists elsewhere on their site that can break down Regional Dispersion by country.
More than that, the infographic could have contained where Latinx people were and where they were going.
Migration Policy’s South American Immigrants in the United States gives a hint as to how much more useful a well-made infographic can be. Showing migration (new people) instead of (net people) allows them to tell a story about the changing conditions that latinos may be facing.
And let’s face it, these are latino people we are talking about, not latinx. Which is the first thing the people read when looking at the article and is something that a vast majority of people don’t use and is likely to make people want to dismiss it – a feeling compounded by the many percentages discussed earlier.
While I’m focusing on the essential worthlessness of the infographic, I also want to point out that none of the flags on the infographic are correct.
Now when I say that this infographic is useless I mean this in a number of ways.
Additionally worth noting is that ALL of the infographics are not paired with any textual content – be it a news story, opinion article or analysis that TeleSUR English has produced.
What, you may ask could have been shown instead? Excellent question.
If this was connected to some story, for instance comparing the cost of percent THC to price?
But not, that’s not really all that interested either. Here’s some examples of “marijuana infographics”:
Now I have my issues with this infographic too – it needs a source listed; the deaths per substance at the bottom should be a bar chart; the prohibition cost listed covers all of drugs war spending (though for what year I don’t know) rather than just marijuana so that’s not appropriate either.
But even then this is at least giving some useful information besides an appropriate price to pay a drug dealer.
This chart I really love, which really isn’t a surprise because Statista always produces great work.
***
Despite my criticism of the past four years of the infographics that TeleSUR English’s has produced and the people that signed off on it, there may be a change coming soon.
Earlier today, February 22nd, Patricia Villegas tweeted the following.
While I’m glad that Patricia Villegas has begun multimedia journalism workshops for TeleSUR and TeleSUR Englis at their headquarters in Caracas.
Furthermore, I also wonder what’s happening with the content that they produce – is it going to be disseminated solely for the people present there, or are they going to make this useful information available for free somewhere on there website so that anyone from the Global South can download it and learn it?
I guess we’ll just have to wait and see as to their level of adherence to their stated commitment to those in the Global South. After all, not everyone can afford to spend the money on the books that I have in my quest to master the craft of creating quality inforgraphics.
On first glace it’s clear that Pablo Vivanco has all the proper political bona fides to run TeleSur English.
Pablo was involved with student and Latino organizing activities in Canada. He volunteered for the Center for Spanish Speaking; and founded the Central American Students Association.
Pablo Vivanco has worked as the Public Relations officer for the Chilean Canadian Cultural Association – Salvador Allende, and chaired organizations such as Chile CAN Rise. In addition to his political work he has written many articles for BASICS Community News Service, the North American Congress on Latin America and LINKS – The International Journal of Socialist Renewal before becoming Director of TeleSUR English.
However as I’ll now demonstrate, these political and academic roles did not provide him the knowledge of the modern digital media ecology that’s necessary for one to be a successful Director of such an operation as TeleSUR English and he has not since grasped how to do this in his 4 years at TeleSUR English.
Pablo Vivanco has signed off on the production of thousands of articles that the vast majority of Americans typically avoid reading. Not because of the subject matter or perspective, but because of their reading level.
While TeleSUR English’s departing from industry standard by attempting to provide more context to the news event is laudable, their decision to ignore industry standards by publishing way above most American’s reading level is not. Simply put, it alienates potential readers.
Here’s a PDF with the Readability score of this Opinion article (Graded as a C-) entitled Why Bolivia Fights US Imperialism but Chile does Not.
Here’s a PDF with the Readability score of this Analysis article (graded as an E, lower than an F!) entitled Despite Win, Ecuador’s President in a Tough Spot After Referendum.
I combined the articles Venezuela: Maduro Invites All International Observers ‘Willing to Come’ to Oversee April Election and Venezuela to Seek ‘Other Markets’ if US Goes Ahead With Oil Embargo: Maduro into one to obtain their Readability Scores, and received similar scores indicating that they far above the average American’s preferred reading level.
Attention to this is incredibly important as it affects the likelihood of content being shared.
As mentioned in my previous article, TeleSUR English: 4 Years of Corruption, Wasted Money and Lost Opportunities, poor UX and back end coding has a negative impact on SEO. This issue is so pervasive on the website, that it’s worth touching upon again in more detail.
These errors not only drive people away, but negatively effects search ranking, thus making it more difficult for those searching for context to come across the information on their website.
Whereas other major digital media operations like New York Times and the Washington Post have transitioned to more interactive storytelling approaches that uses R, Tableau, Excel and similar programs TeleSUR English stagnates by using the same broken javascript frames to merely link traditional photo with traditional text. Information is beautiful, but the way TeleSUR English presents it’s stories is often not.
The biggest problems TeleSUR English struggles with is, it seems, a lack of knowledge of or adherence to new media best practices.
In the new media environment the essential driver for growth is building relationships.
In a highly congested digital media landscape, forming a lasting relationship means you can reach more people and influence more people for less money. It takes the form of onsite engagement, large email subscriber numbers, people positively referencing your work on other websites.
A cursory review of TeleSUR English’s Twitter and Facebook accounts as well as their on-site comments sections shows the barest of engagement, even in the places where one might expect it.
Onsite Example of a Failed Controversy Meant to Drive Engagement
In the article Why This Sanders Supporter is Boarding the Trump Train by Cassandra Fairbanks, for instance, there is none of the controversy in the form of comments that the article was likely projected to achieve.
Comparing the 6 comments here to the 2,685 found on this Breitbart article, on a roughly similar topic at around the same time, it’s clear that it didn’t achieve the desired effect of generating comments at all. What it shows is that TeleSUR English has a small audience that doesn’t care to engage even when content that should offend the target audience is posted.
Twitter Example of Failed Engagement
As it relates to information on Twitter’s engagement for this article, I decided against using an API to scrape, review, process and interpret the information about this due to the cost as it’s immediately evident that there’s a lack-of-meaningful engagement here as well.
Instead of what works, both accounts simply drown their readers in posts.
The motto of TeleSUR English seems to be quantity over quality.
At the 2016 Left Forum, Pablo Vivanco spoke about his experiences as the Director of TeleSUR English.
While the entirety of his presentation has not been made available (and if anyone happens to have it I would hope that the email it to me), I was able to discover an interesting quote from his presentation:
“Social media platforms are controlled by corporate media,” he [Pablo] said, “But these are the ways people consume information and news. To not participate is to cede space we shouldn’t cede.”
“When we launched there was a fair amount of resources put into buying views and likes on social media platforms,” Vivanco said ruefully. “But social media functions on algorithms. You need organic engagement and reach- using networks and working with others, building engagement.”
In a few public words Pablo Vivanco gave evidence as to why TeleSUR English should be penalized by algorithms designed to halt “fake news”.
Whether or not Facebook, Google and other such algorithms are designed to find and factor in such comments is honestly beyond me, but I do know that an event occurred which provides insight into just how many followers Pablo Vivanco purchased and how many of TeleSUR English’s followers are actually real. It was shocking to me as it was MUCH lower than what I’d projected initially.
After TeleSUR English’s page went down for 21 hours on January 21st, Carlos Ballesteros, a contributing author to Newsweek, wrote an article entitled Latin American News Outlet’s Facebook Page Mysteriously Disappears for 24 Hours.
At a time where Facebook censorship is a hot-button issue, no other media outlets picked up the story. If this sounds surprising, it’s less so after the story becomes clearer.
For one, shortly after publication, a correction was made to correct the prior claim that Facebook censored them. The reality being that this was just speculation on the part of Pablo Vivanco.
Secondarily, a little bit of research shows that Carlos Ballesteros and Pablo Vivanco are long-standing political colleagues – evidenced by their co-existent signatures on a resolution defending the SNTE teacher union, in a La Jornada declaration from March 2013 on pages 12-13. Most outlets doing background, like myself were likely to have picked this up and seen the article as a favor to a friend.
There are other issues with this article as well, such as Carlos Ballesteros informing the reader that “TeleSUR boasts a viewership of nearly half a billion people in 110 countries,” which defies all projections that I’ve seen. However the real interesting thing, is the organic response after the profile was taken down, presumably, for political censorship.
TeleSUR English’s Actual Audience Numbers
After the false report that TeleSUR English was censored began circulation, a page called TeleSUR News Aggregate came into existence and posted notifications to follow it in a number of Leftist-oriented groups on Facebook and alternative news sites.
What’s notable about this is that the number of people who rallied in “defense” of TeleSUR English was a far cry from the ~410,000 currently “liking” it – only 3,538 people.
Also notable is how that now a single person in any of the 40+ “Friends of TeleSUR English” Facebook groups said a peep about it’s being temporarily unpublished.
Does this mean that there are 406,000 fake likes for TeleSUR English on Facebook?
It’s possible. The only was we would know for sure was if this company engaged in some radical transparency.
The budget for the first year of TeleSUR English was $17,600,000.
If we presume that operating costs dropped from $17.6 million in the first year to 10 to 15 million in the following four years, this would then mean that the average amount of money that the governments supporting TeleSUR English was spending per genuine follower – taken to be the number of people that followed TeleSUR News Aggregate – is $16,053.
True, this doesn’t include the numbers of followers from TeleSUR English’s other properties, however, it’s quite likely that those numbers are equally false and I think it fair to state that the primary outlet is likely to be the most authoritative source for actual numbers.
