Flicking through the Binancial Times

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With City AM up for sale — the London freesheet now a victim of both advertising AND working trends — it’s a good moment to check in on the state of modern media.

FT Alphaville has been watching, with a certain degree of weariness, the activities of Binance Feed, which is basically a crypto newswire that any third party can post to. The platform is currently in its beta (ie public testing) stages.

In a sense, the model isn’t completely dissimilar to legitimate services like PR NewsWire — or, less flatteringly, the many social media feeds dominated by inane grifters.

Anyway, here’s the lede of a recent post on Binance Feed, engagingly titled “Report SEC Chairman Gary Gensler Resigned Is It True?”:

A fake website recently started spreading rumors that SEC Chairman Gary Gensler has resigned, but that is not true.

The “fake website” in question was thecryptoalert.com. Here’s how the piece (which according to its on-page ticker has received more than 87,000 views) is presented:

The article’s about as bad as you might expect, although the final paragraph is a gem:

Disclaimer: This article is based on anonymous reports and should be treated as speculation until official confirmation is provided by the SEC or Gary Gensler himself. The details of the alleged misconduct and the internal investigation remain undisclosed, and the motivations behind Gensler’s resignation are yet to be confirmed.

God only knows if author “Mathew Jacob” is real. There’s this Twitter account, which posted about Indian visa problems twice in 2020 but since May this year has only posted about crypto “airdrops”:

CoinTelegraph reckons it’s all just AI providing some productivity gains:

On July 1, a news story appeared on a website dubbed “CryptoAlert” claiming that Gensler had “submitted his resignation following an internal investigation,” citing an anonymous official.

However, Cointelegraph found the article’s text scored a 96.8% on third-party AI-detector ZeroGPT, indicating there is a high likelihood the vast majority of the text was generated by AI.

Regardless, punters could just have easily got the news from Binance Feed. In a post from Sunday that’s still available on Binance.com, noted journalist CRYPTO DOMINIUM wrote:

In a stunning revelation, an anonymous official from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has reportedly disclosed that Gary Gensler, the Chairman of the SEC, has submitted his resignation following an internal investigation. This bombshell news has sent shockwaves through the financial industry, raising concerns about the integrity of the regulatory body and the implications for investor confidence.

The anonymous SEC official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity…

(There’s also a Spanish version up here.)

The English article is a straight copy-paste job from CoinAlert, although problematically, as some users have noticed, that still hit the standards needed to enter Google’s news feed:

🚨 One of the headlines on the official #Binance site is claiming that it is confirmed that @GaryGensler of @SECGov has resigned. @SECEnfDirector.#Binance is trying to gaslight the non-English speaking world into thinking they aren’t in trouble.

(h/t @mindofanu, a good follow) pic.twitter.com/tyu4W4mgbc

— ⚯ M Cryptadamus ⚯ | @[email protected] (@Cryptadamist) July 4, 2023

Alphaville couldn’t recreate getting Binance to appear in Google News — but we don’t know if that means Google have subsequently stopped Binance Feed from being treated as a legitimate news source, or if there’s been some kind of algorithmic change.

Binance Feed, for its part, has some pretty robust absolutely minimal arse-covering in place:

Binance Feed Community Platform Terms and Conditions 

Last Revised May 5, 2023

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMERS AND RISK WARNING:

The content on this platform may include information, views and opinions posted by third parties. Some of these third parties may also be remunerated by us, based on the popularity of their posts…

We shall therefore not be liable or responsible for any errors or omissions, or for the results obtained from your use of such information.

There’s no apparent detail on who is getting remunerated, and by how much, although an example of a recent “Featured” post by Coinovation — “Is US SEC Chair Gary Gensler Resigning?” — might give a sense of what passes for high quality. From that piece (our emphasis):

It’s worth noting that false rumors surrounding Gensler’s resignation have circulated before. Back in April, questionable sources spread claims that Gensler was on the verge of being “fired.” These incidents highlight the impact of misinformation and the need for accurate reporting within the crypto industry.

We’re sure Binance will be doing its part in that noble battle.