Over the last few years I have noticed a disturbing trend regarding breaking news or emergent events. If I try to use standard commercially-available search engines such as Google or Bing (or DuckDuckGo or Ecosia, which like Bing, are owned by Microsoft) the top search results are usually links to posts on social media platforms such as Facebook or Instagram or Reddit or similar platforms. Links to articles written by actual professional journalists who follow long-standing codes of journalistic ethics (including fact-checking) are becoming increasingly hard to find.
Let me just say straight up: posts on social media platforms are not journalism. Therefore I do not trust these when they offer "breaking news" flashes. From the Russian aggression against Ukraine to the current mess in the Mideast, I therefore do NOT consult anything found on YouTube, Quora, Rednote, Facebook, or the like. The fact that posts on these platforms have been displacing genuine journalism can be attributed to multiple causes, such as the corporatization and monopolization of historically independent news outlets, the diversion of advertising revenue from historically independent news outlets to the owners of massively deployed social media platforms, and the massive gaming of the system of page and website rankings on the largest search platforms. However, one particular cause is the fact that the providers of responsible journalism have increasingly hidden their content behind paywalls. This in turn is probably an effect of the diversion of advertising revenue from actual news outlets to the owners of social media platforms.
So I'd like to set forth my strategy for coping with this proliferation of hot air and word salad on social media served up by search engines instead of actual journalism. Whenever I try to find out more details about an emerging story of interest, I use one of the features of advanced search that was originally deployed on Google. If, for instance, I hear a report or rumor that a dozen giant heads of lettuce grew legs and walked through a town in the Midwest, killing dozens of people, I type in the search box of my search engine of choice something like '"giant heads of lettuce" walking' and see what search results come up. If the first two or three pages of search results are dominated by links with titles like "Facebook: You've Got to See This! - Giant Heads of Lettuce On the Rampage!" or, "YouTube: Midwest Town Threatened By Lettuce!" then I modify my search query as follows. I type into the search box '"giant heads of lettuce" walking -Youtube -Facebook -Reddit -Instagram -Threads -X -Quora -"Fox News" -Tiktok' and run a new search query. The way this works is that whatever I type in quotes such as "giant heads of lettuce" returns search results that contain that quoted phrase verbatim. On the other hand, whatever keywords have a short dash (-) in front of them are excluded from the search. This means that any search results offered by a platform that has a dash in front of it are excluded from my search results.
This method works tolerably well for general searches, although it breaks down seriously when I try to search for pictures. For instance, if I click on the "Images" tab of my search page and type -"baboon brushing teeth" "wikimedia commons"' in the search box, I will definitely get all kinds of images that are NOT hosted by Wikimedia Commons! If, moreover, I try to use the dash prefix to exclude those images that are not hosted by Wikimedia Commons, they will show up anyway. So maybe my prefix dash method is not so foolproof after all. If search providers ruin general search in the same way that they have ruined image search, then my prefix dash method of filtering search results will break down. But never fear - I still have other methods up my sleeve.
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