Tech Companies Are Destroying Democracy and the Free Press
As the presidential election approaches, the cracks in the digital facade are once again showing.
Facebook just removed an “I Love America” page, run by Ukrainians, which pushed recycled pro-Trump imagery from the Internet Research Agency, the Russian group that tried to influence the 2016 election. As it turned out, “I Love America” wasn’t state sponsored — the Ukrainians were just running the page for the advertising money. A similar page with falsified content, “Police Lives Matter,” is now run out of Kosovo.
These two phony Facebook pages illustrate the crisis of the free press and democracy: Advertising revenue that used to go to quality journalism is now captured by big tech intermediaries, and some of that money now goes to dishonest, low-quality and fraudulent content.
This is the first presidential election happening after the business model for journalism collapsed. Advertising revenue for print newspapers has fallen by two-thirds since 2006. From 2008 to 2018, the number of newspaper reporters dropped 47 percent. Two-thirds of counties in America now have no daily newspaper, and 1,300 communities have lost all local coverage. Even outlets native to the web, like BuzzFeed and HuffPost, have laid off reporters. This problem is a global one; for example, in Australia from 2014 to 2018, the number of journalists in traditional print publications fell by 20 percent.
The signaling functions of news brands and the cultural barriers meant to guard against distorting effects of advertising have broken down. In their place, a dysfunctional information ecosystem has emerged, characterized by polarization, addiction and conspiracy theories. In Europe and in the United States, young men learn race science on YouTube. In Brazil, citizens learn that Zika is spread by vaccines. As the Center for Humane Technology puts it: “Today’s tech platforms are caught in a race to the bottom of the brain stem to extract human attention. It’s a race we’re all losing.”
There are two drivers of this crisis. The first is the concentration of online advertising revenue in the hands of Google and Facebook — global monopolies sitting astride public discourse, diverting money that used to go to publishers to themselves. The second is an ethical breakdown — a natural consequence of advertising financing an information utility like a social network or search engine — which I call “conflicted communications.”