''Make It Fair'' campaign, SEO tips, and the launch of Noosphere

Success of employee-owned newspapers, truth and misinformation, and security concerns - all in this week's Content Aware.

Published: 16:14, 27 February 2025

Last updated: 16:14, 27 February 2025

Corbidge comments on... Make It Fair
On February 25, 2025, the UK media and creative industries stood together in a powerful display of solidarity behind the ''Make It Fair'' campaign to warn and push back against the government's proposal that would allow AI companies to bypass the country's copyright laws and let AI systems train their models on creators' and publishers' works. GPP content maestro picks up his magnifying glass for a closer inspection.
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Noosphere launched
Jane Ferguson, a veteran war reporter with a career at CNN, Al Jazeera, and PBS NewsHour, has launched Noosphere, a news app that will feature content from independent journalists. With a focus on high-quality reporting and operating on an invite-only basis, Noosphere will share revenue with journalists based on the level of engagement their content brings to the platform.
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Crawl issues
An observant SEO noticed that some websites are seeing a decline in Google’s crawl rate alongside longer server response times. If you’re encountering this issue, the number one recommended action is to check whether your CDN provider has updated their IP ranges for Googlebot.
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Knowledge graph and entity SEO tips
We love entities and knowledge graphs at Glide, and they often become major talking points at our SEO events for the power they can bring to content and SEO. Not sure how they can benefit your sites? Read this great guide by Paul DeMott, Chief Technology Officer at Helium SEO, to learn how they can help search engines better understand your content.
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Success with fewer zeros
The ultra-wealthy buying media outlets is nothing new - from Jeff Bezos to Marc Benioff (and even Musk recently joking about buying MSNBC), yet there's a unique appeal when those without massive fortunes find success. The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism highlights success stories of five employee-owned newspapers, sharing their journey, how they made it work, and the lessons they've learned along the way.
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''I think I'm stuck''
xAI announced Grok 3, branding it ''a lightning-fast AI agent'' designed to ''relentlessly seek the truth''. These bold claims are nevertheless challenged, as one Grok conversation has raised eyebrows due to its filtering of sources that label Musk or Trump as misinformation spreaders.
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Channeling readers
UK publishers are experimenting with Facebook Channels, Meta's one-way messaging tool for publishers and creators, as a new distribution channel to better engage their readers and drive traffic. Here’s what Reach and News UK titles are doing, and lessons to be learned.
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Another AI lawsuit
Keeping track of AI lawsuits? Update it with the latest Chegg vs. Google entry where Chegg, an education tech company, is suing the search engine boss claiming that its AI Overviews have negatively impacted Chegg's traffic and caused a dip in revenue.
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Google kills off data voids
A recent study revealed that Google has stopped showing the so called ''data voids'' - warning banners for low-quality search results - just ahead of the 2024 US presidential election, despite no significant improvements in result quality. These banners, introduced in 2022, were designed to warn users of unreliable information, but were phased out after being rarely shown.
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Deep Research
The theory of "model collapse" suggested that AI systems trained on its own outputs would eventually lose track of true data distributions and degrade. A recent deep dive into OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity’s deep research tools suggests this is already happening, as they're increasingly relying on AI-generated content and again turning the web into an all you can eat buffet for AI to feed on.
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Security concerns
Worried about AI tools retaining the info you enter into them? A cybersecurity company has uncovered that more than 20,000 previously public GitHub repositories are still visible in Copilot because of Bing's caching, despite this data no longer being available on the web.
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Rise in misinformation?
Starting this spring, Meta plans to shut down their third party fact-checking program launched in 2016 and replace it with a Community Notes model, claiming this will allow ''more speech''. But this, as ProPublica reports, coincides with a new incentive program for creators based on high engagement numbers, which could give way to more exploits of the loosened guardrails.
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Instagram's moderation struggles
A surge of NSFW content recently disrupted Instagram users and their Reels section, following Meta’s changes to moderation policies. While this issue appears to have been addressed, it’s far from the first time their moderation has caused problems, raising even more questions about whether they can effectively manage it.
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