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What's metadata?

Just a note about them using the data. They might not use the data directly as you say. However it is quite likely that they use the data in some indirect way. In the modern way it would be fed to some sort of AI algorithm, and although this AI might not be allowed to disclose the data directly it can still answer questions based on this data. Maybe not so much to non-paying customers but Google does provide a lot of expensive technologies to companies which might be more liberal with other customers data then you expect.

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Google offers a free version of many applications, but their paid version has more features and storage. The more Google gets its users to rely on the applications it provides, the greater the likelihood that more users will convert to a paid version when they need more features. Providing free applications also takes away market share from Microsoft, one of Google's biggest rivals in the workplace app space.

Google may not be after your actual content, but they'll gladly sell your Metadata to the highest bidder...hopefully it's not your mother-in-law.

The cost of them is your data, which Google then uses to better target ads.

Everyone of those services reports vast amounts of data back to Google, nor necessarily the actual content but all the other Metadata.

Remember Metadata is good enough for the militaries to use to make kill decisions.

edit To expand on this a bit, some of those tools were expressly created to get people to use them so that they could then sell them to companies, google suite is the prime example of that. This doesn't mean they don't suck up as much data as they can.

Remember if it's an online service and it's free the product is you!

To be specific, cheaper, more effective advertising options from likes of Facebook and Google. Even further concentrating where people get their news from.

There are lots of unprofitable news media, yet they exist. They are the mouthpiece of their owners, and serve to sway public opinion.

Yes they do. /sarcasm

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In bygone times, it was usual for there to be 2 or more papers even in midsize and small cities. Each paper had its own bias, but consumers could chose to read the one confirming their existing biases or read both to try to get the whole picture. The smaller papers have all been consolidated into huge corporations these days and even the larger ones are being put out of business by inflation and the internet.

See a short clip of Chomsky's interview on the Propaganda Model of mass media.

You do know that Musk is pretty biased, himself, right?

Editorial bias has been the norm through most of our history. Knowing who is reading your paper is important to know, because that is how you court advertisers. And catering to those readers is how you increase circulation so that you can charge those advertisers more.

Now, for most of the 2nd half of the 20th century, this bias was, for the most part, confined to the opinion pages. The hard news sections tended to avoid editorializing in their stories. However, in the digital age, the economic pressure is just too great to not cater a lot more blatantly to viewers/readers.

That is in large part the origin of new papers. The was primarily started by rich people or groups to give a voice to their political ideas. So most of them did not end up like that, most were intentionally started with that idea in mind.

This, in a nutshell, is it.

'But why do journalists promote those opinions or points of view if they're just being told to?'

Because they wouldn't be there if they didn't already lean that way themselves. Journalists don't become corrupted or biased, they're only there because they already are.

The people with money want their thoughts and opinions to be the standard so that's what they spend their money on.

Editors are directed by COE to publish content that satisfies their advertisers. It's a business that must be profitable to survive.

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Rich people buy the newspaper company. The owner of the company gets to dictate editorial policy.

There is nothing illegal about either of those in basically any country.

Either because that country has freedom of the press, which means the press can kinda do...whatever (within limits, libel laws are really serious in some places). Including hiring people that are inherently biased and refusing to publish work that doesn't say what they want to say.

Or the country does not have that and then its basically the state itself that's doing this.

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Caffeine and melatonin supplements ;)

Too busy worrying that my heart is going to implode than I am about my place in the universe