Gossip interceptors

Related to the bot invasion of Facebook local news sites….

Altman’s OpenAI says it handles 1 million questions per week about local news. Most are on the subjects that Facebook groups cover but legacy media totally ignores:

People continue to trust local news more than national news, and the demand for reliable local news is already visible inside ChatGPT at a rate of about 1 million prompts per week. Most of that interest focuses on daily civic life: community events and local businesses, crime and emergency response, and legislation, courts, and public policy.

For perspective, one million per week is a SMALL number. People who want local news tend to check daily, so a million questions per week means 200k users, equal to one mid-sized city. SpokaneNews has 322K followers, roughly all the adults in the metro area.

OpenAI is trying to expand its local news biz via a partnership with Axios, a reliably orthodox source of DNC talking points.

The information is already there on the web in billions of conversations per day, and I’m sure NSA has been processing it into local developments for a long time. Spies mastered this art centuries ago, first with human informants, then by intercepting the postal system, then by intercepting radio and telephone.

Small newspapers formerly paid gossip interceptors to determine who was visiting, who was ill, who had a new job. Newspapers also hosted the local post office so they could do spy-style traffic analysis on incoming and outgoing mail.

Facebook groups are self-organizing gossip interceptors, taking comments from people in various neighborhoods. Sooner or later the group hears from somebody who is very close or involved with the story. You have to do your own editing, not hard after you get accustomed to the patterns.