The Digital Counter-Revolution
It’s hard to remember now how many people thought the internet would secure the reign of independent journalism by boosting the flow of information.
– Anya Schiffrin
Many pinned their hopes on the rise of new digital news and media outlets as spaces for diversity and a recent news ecology. Technology was supposed to be, and for many, it remains, how journalism would re-invent itself.
Instead, digital media has become the site of surveillance and propaganda.
Those were heady days. A revolution was coming, and the new digital media start-ups were about to storm the barricades of conventional journalism and turn it on its head. In a memo to his staff, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti told them, “We’re at the start of a new golden age of media” and compared their digital media organisation to an early-stage Time Inc. [Jonah Peretti, “Is History Repeating Itself? My Recent Memo to the BuzzFeed staff,” Medium, March 4, 2014].
The reality has been otherwise.
On the contrary, it has become a site of censorship, public shaming, and surveillance. Digital ventures like BuzzFeed, Vox, and Vice may create the impression that there is growing diversity in the news. However, this veils that many of these organisations are owned by large legacy media corporations. Furthermore, they need help to compete against the challenge offered by corporations like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon, moving into the media and entertainment space and controlling access to the readers. [Elisa Shearer & Jeffrey Gottfried, “News Use Across Social Media Platforms”, Pew Research, September 7, 2017]. Nearly 53% of US adults get their news from social media sites, and Facebook is the leading source of online information. YouTube and Twitter follow. [ Elisa Shearer and Amy Mitchell, “News Use Across Social Media Platforms in 2020,” Pew Research Center, January 12, 2021].
Significant staff layoffs in 2018 and 2019 at BuzzFeed, Vice, and HuffPost were a cruel reminder that the economics of the business and the advantages still lay with the big players and the established ones. [David Uberti, “BuzzFeed and the digital media meltdown,” Columbia Journalism Review, March 11, 2019]. Corporations like AT&T, Verizon, Disney, Comcast, Time Warner, and others have invested millions into digital news properties and bought some outright. Despite the rise of digital and the fragmentation of the news media landscape, established media companies dominate online traffic, audience attention, and content generation. [Eiri Elvestad and Angela Phillips, Misunderstanding News Audiences: Seven Myths of the Social Media Era, Routledge, 2018]. Statistics reveal that mainstream news organisation sites and those that derive content from them still attract the most traffic. [Alexa, The Top 500 Sites on the Web, https://www.alexa.com/topsites]. Increasingly relying on social media as a news source does not mean people turn away from traditional, independent news sources.
Besides, social media allows conventional news organisations–and individual reporters–to expand their audiences, sources, and diversity of offerings and promote their work. But worse, those "who rely most on social media for political news…tend to be less likely than other news consumers to closely follow major news stories, and…also tend to be less knowledgeable about these topics." [ Amy Mitchell, Mark Jurkowitz, J. Baxter Oliphant and Elisa Shearer, “Americans Who Mainly Get Their News on Social Media Are Less Engaged, Less Knowledgeable,” Pew Research Center, July 30, 2020].
Yet, sites like Facebook have become powerful platforms for disseminating news and political content. “Social media and platform companies took over what publishers couldn’t have built even if they wanted to.” As Emily Bell explains
Now the news is filtered through algorithms and platforms which are opaque and unpredictable. The news business is embracing this trend, and digital-native entrants like BuzzFeed, Vox, and Fusion have built their presence on the premise that they are working within this system, not against it…the inevitable outcome of this is the increase in power of social media companies.” [Emily Bell, “Facebook is eating the World,” Columbia Journalism Review, March 7, 2016].
Nechushtai Efrat calls this “infrastructure capture” where organisations such as Google and Facebook not only “provide the majority of the audience for online news and are significant sources of potential growth in viewership” but also the “data on the reach of stories…[and]…analytics and insights” that are used to evaluate them. [Efrat Nechushtai, “Could digital platforms capture the media through infrastructure?” Journalism, 2018, Vol. 19(8) 1043–1058].
It seriously weakens journalism’s independence and right to legal protection as behemoth corporations, accountable only to shareholder and market priorities, increasingly become self-proclaimed managers of “appropriate” content or are coerced and shamed by authoritarian and democratic (despotic) governments into censoring content. [Glenn Greenwald, “How Silicon Valley, in a Show of Monopolistic Force, Destroyed Parler,” Substack: Greenwald, January 12, 2021, online here:]
Ironically, today, our liberal politicians and corporate media are often at the forefront of encouraging digital corporations to intervene actively and censor content. Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) told Mark Zuckerberg when questioning Silicon Valley CEOs in October 2020: "The issue is not that the companies before us today is that they're taking too many posts down. The issue is that they're leaving too many dangerous posts up." [By Tony Romm, Rachel Lerman, Cat Zakrzewski, Heather Kelly and Elizabeth Dwoskin, “Facebook, Google, Twitter CEOs clash with Congress in pre-election showdown,” The Washington Post, October 28, 2020].
Rather than protecting a people's right to speak–a right enshrined in US law, regardless of the nature of the speech, a right repeatedly upheld by the US Supreme Court–our most passionate Left-liberal pundits, politicians, and journalists are at the front lines insisting that digital corporations engage in censorship of "inappropriate" and "dangerous" voices. In the wake of the 2021 Capital riot, Donald Trump was immediately banned from practically all social media platforms, resulting in celebrations and cheers from the liberal elite. Greg Bensinger, a New York Times editorial board member, demanded that "Mr Zuckerberg and Twitter's CEO, Jack Dorsey, must play a fundamental role in restoring truth and decency to our democracy (emphasis mine) and democracies around the world.” Here, "restoring truth and decency" are rather apparent euphemisms for censorship of those the liberals find objectionable.