This blogpost is adapted from a transcript of my talk given at Breakwater Festival in Gdańsk. You can find the slides here.

I am an Internet plumber. I’ve been an Internet plumber in many organizations, including journalistic ones. I’ve also done information security work for media organizations, for example in the run up to and during the Panama Papers.

What I am not is a journalist. I have not studied journalism in any formal way. I’ve been writing for OKO.press and other outlets for several years now, but I don’t feel that alone makes me a member of that club.

I still see myself mainly as a techie.

So I beg your forgiveness, for I – a person with arguably no real journalistic credentials – will now have opinions on journalism, with you, actual journalists, present in the room. This might end up being a phenomenal demonstration of the Dunning–Kruger effect. I do hope you’ll at least enjoy the ride.

My one saving grace here is that I will focus on the interplay between journalism and technology. I will be making some generalizations; please bear with me. If your organization is one of the few that are the exceptions, thank you for that, and I’m sorry.

Media ecosystem is in crisis¶

I think it’s fair to say the whole media sector is in crisis. Media organizations and journalists are hurting, and have been hurting for a very long time. There are obviously many, many reasons for that, most of them outside of media organizations’ control.

But not all.

There are three aspects of this hurt that I want to focus on: money, eyeballs, and trust. I don’t think it’s controversial to say journalism cannot thrive without these three.

The point I want to make to you today is this:

Media organizations have materially helped create the crisis they currently find themselves in, by being uncritical and naïve about the tech sector and power dynamics of its products and services.

Unchecked power¶

I don’t think I need to convince anyone in this room that tech sector’s power is currently not checked in any meaningful way.

Heads of state wait hat in hand on its leaders, legislation is being shaped by its interests to the detriment of everything else, regulatory action takes years if not decades, and usually ends up with a slap on the wrist.

President of the European Parliament meets with Zuck on his own terms, takes a publicity photo with the creepiest Meta product so far prominently displayed – and proudly posts that on Zuck’s social media platform.

Complete and utter capture.

Tech companies release and operate services that cause real, measurable harm to living, breathing people. Executives of these companies are aware of this, often having been warned early about these effects, and yet nothing changes in any meaningful way.

Political parties push for privacy-hostile legislation under the guise of fighting child sexual abuse materials online, and post about this on Twitter, a social network where generating child sexual abuse materials – from real photos of real children – was not a bug, but a paid feature. And one that doesn’t even apply the most basic filters to remove well known child sexual abuse materials. The lowest of bars to clear.

This is a good moment to pause and ask: are you on X/Twitter? Are you paying for it? We’ll get back to this.

A decade ago a person torrenting a few movies could end up in jail. Kids got sued for millions of dollars for downloading a couple dozen songs. Today tech leaders complain that if they were to pay the licensing fees for having downloaded literally every piece of digital content out there, that would kill their business model.

A business model which is so successful, by the way, that my tiny one-man company made infinitely more profit last month than OpenAI ever has. If you’re confused by that look up division by zero.

Information is power, and both journalism and the tech sector deal in information. They directly compete in the attention economy. But only the tech companies seem to be aware of this.

For the technology sector to have gained the effectively unchecked power it now wields, for it to have become the antidemocratic behemoth that it is today, for Zuckerbergs and Musks and Thiels and Bezoses of this world to become the all-powerful global tech broligarchy, the tech sector had to subdue, suppress, and subvert journalism.

And so it did. But not without help from the media itself.

Money¶

Funding journalism has always been difficult, but at least for a while advertising was a relatively effective way to do so, even once the Internet became a thing.

Until, that is, ad networks consolidated into what is effectively a duopoly of Google and Meta, controlling their respective surveilance ad marketplaces end-to-end. This allows them to extract as much rent as they feel like:

The Google/Meta duopoly sucks up 51% of display advertising revenue – more than triple the historic take for advertising intermediaries (buyers, brokers, agencies, etc).”

Media organizations didn’t have a lot of power over that process of consolidation. But they did have –- and continue to have -– a choice in whose ads they carry. They did have and continue to have a choice of whether they expose their readership to creepy targeted advertising – sending data wholesale to surveillance capitalists – or choose a membership and subscription model, or maybe go with contextual ads instead.

Like New York Times has done soon after the GDPR went into force:

The publisher blocked all open-exchange ad buying on its European pages, followed swiftly by behavioral targeting. Instead, NYT International focused on contextual and geographical targeting for programmatic guaranteed and private marketplace deals and has not seen ad revenues drop as a result, according to Jean-Christophe Demarta, svp for global advertising at New York Times International.

Media organizations did have, and continue to have, a choice whether they continue to feed and nurture these behemoths with valuable data, by using tools like Google Analytics on their websites, or integrating Meta’s intrusive personal information harvesting libraries into their mobile apps, thus having to force obtrusive and manipulative consent screens upon their readers.

They also often dive head-on into every shady hype-driven get-rich-quick scheme out there. That’s also a choice. Remeber Civil, the cryptocurrency that was supposed to “save journalism” through, among others, micropayments? Here’s Wall Street Journal had some nice words about them in 2018:

Civil applies the tenets of cryptoeconomics – the practice of powering online marketplaces with digital currency logged on encrypted ledgers – to the financial challenges facing the news industry.

It did not save journalism. It went defunct somewhere in 2020. That was not a surprise to anyone critically scrutinizing the cryptocurrency space.

“Why can’t journalists join the NFT party, too?” asks the New York Times in 2021. “Because it is a scam,” I’d have responded. NFT bubble popped about a year later. Loads of money was lost, with a few people getting obnoxiously rich off of the bubble. It was not a surprise either.

Many media organizations have tied themselves to surveillance capitalists so tightly, that they push for measures that give them even more power. Like “link tax”.

What are the power dynamics of link tax? Who ends up controlling the money faucet?

What happens if a media organization funded largely through link tax starts writing critically about the very companies that are paying it directly? Will the money well conspicuously dry out? The incentives are perverse.

By all means, tax these companies to the ground, and give the money to journalists! But do so in any of the myriad ways that does not end up giving them even more power over the information ecosystem. Because they will wield it to your detriment.

Besides, link tax or no link tax, Big Tech can just stop linking to media organizations. Or, meddle with where media links end up in the user interface. Or can start limiting reach and charging for restoring it – or for the ability to post links at all.

In fact, they did all of these things already.

Click-throughs from Google are drying out. So are click-throughs from Facebook, and from X/Twitter. These companies do not care about you and your content anymore, because they don’t have to – Google said it outright. They even did a little experiment to prove their point.

Meta is actively pushing for auto-generated slop and polarizing disinformation instead of promoting actual journalistic content the same way TV stations have been pushing reality shows when they figured out they don’t have to pay scriptwriters.

How did they become such powerful gatekeepers?

Eyeball silos¶

Facebook can shut down your account. Your hosting provider can shut down your website. These are not the same.

If a hosting provider shuts you down, you find another hosting provider, and everyone can reach you again. It’s a few hours, maybe a day of disruption and you’re back up and running; your previous provider has no say over this. All your readers need in order to continue to read you is a web browser.

When Facebook shuts you down, that’s that.

Nobody can reach your Facebook page. Moving to another social network does not solve the problem, because your Facebook followers are on Facebook – they would have to set up an account on a new service, learn a new app, accept new Terms of Service. Which they won’t.

Big Tech services are designed to be like that on purpose. To be centralized, to be vertically integrated, and through that to be de facto monopolies. Centralized, vertically integrated services are silos. Monopoly is the business model. Gatekeeping is how value is extracted.

“Competition is for losers”, as Peter Thiel said in 2014; he is one of the first investors in Facebook… and a recipient of 2026 Axel Springer award.

Hosting providers compete with one another because their services are standardized. This makes switching relatively easy. Same with e-mail providers. Or Fediverse instances.

I am not saying “market will solve it”; it won’t. But I am saying: ability to easily switch providers is a crucial safeguard in the context of any service.

Instagram is not competing with TikTok in the same sense as one hosting provider competes with another, because these are both vertically integrated, centralized platforms, even if the functionality is somewhat similar. To follow your Instagram account your readers must necessarily have an Instagram account and submit to Instagram’s Terms of Service, and to follow your TikTok account they necessarily need to have a TikTok account and submit to TikTok’s ToS.

Core issue behind the crisis¶

And I get it. This is boring. Nobody wants to constantly think about protocols and silos and centralization and vertical integration. But nobody wants to think about ownership structures and shell companies and money laundering schemes. And yet we do, because we recognize that is important.

This is just as important. This is the core reason why these platforms can be the gatekeepers they are today. This is one of the core reasons behind the spread of disinformation, the dwindling click-throughs and ad revenues, and ultimately behind tech companies explicitly, insolently telling news organizations they don’t matter.

Journalists and media organizations by and large refused to acknowledge and understand and act upon for two decades. And continue to.

Eyeballs in the silo¶

An eyeball silo is no good without filling it with eyeballs. That’s not trivial… unless you get a bit help.

Media organizations have been promoting Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter for years, relentlessly. Not so long ago, every article on every media site out there had to have “Like us on Facebook”, “Share on Twitter”, Facebook-powered comment sections, and other similar UI elements. Many still do.

Most news sites still cannot imagine publishing an article that does not embed content from X/Twitter or Instagram. Most still have little icons promoting these platforms on their websites.

How much would any other company have to pay for placing a small logo on a large news site? How much more for the logo to appear under every piece published on that site? X/Twitter gets it all for free.

Just consider what this means. A reader is on your website, engaging with your content on your terms, via infrastructure you actually control, hosted on a service you can switch providers of at will – and what you do is send them over to some locked-down third party silo instead.

Not only that, but at some point media sites started removing RSS/Atom feeds and shutting down their newsletters. Two phenomenal channels of direct communication with your readers, both relying on services that do not lend themselves to becoming gatekeepers, gone.

Is it any wonder that Google killed Google Reader? Standards-based services that do not lend themselves to siloification are not in Google’s best interest.

But they are in yours.

Through media’s own choices relationship with their audience suddenly had to be mediated by social networks, and generally the only social networks journalism treats seriously are only those controlled by the tech giants openly hostile to it.

Consider these two pieces from the same seasoned tech reporter, Lance Ulanoff, former Editor in Chief at PCMag-dot-com:

1. Can Google+ Survive the Hype?

Google+, the presumptive Facebook killer, shows tremendous potential. As someone who warms up to any social network with the alacrity of a Galápagos tortoise, this, for me, is saying something.

2. Six reasons Mastodon won’t survive

William Shatner couldn’t find me on Mastodon.
This was a problem.
(…)
And, no, Mastodon cannot live on hype alone.

There are a few important differences between the two social networks, and between how each is covered. Google+ was an eyeball silo, Mastodon is standards based, with thousands of providers. Google+ got plenty of positive press, Mastodon (and more broadly, the Fediverse) is still today being treated as a butt of a joke. Google+ had corporate backing and infinte money, Mastodon is a tiny project run by an NGO.

Google+ got killed years ago. Mastodon stubbornly survives, already years longer than Google+ had existed.

Media had the power to tell people where to look for information, and exercised that power. Is it at all surprising that eyeballs went where it pointed them to?

Trust¶

The reason why click-throughs from Google Search are drying out is because Google largely replaced search with a slop generator. I don’t think that’s news to anyone at this stage. It is no longer a tool to find reliable sources of information on a topic, it is a tool to get some extruded text that sounds human-like and authoritative even though it might be complete, sometimes outright life-threatening, bullshit.

It is mathmatically impossible for language models not to hallucinate. Text they generate cannot be trustworthy in any meaningful sense, full stop. This is a huge advantage media organizations have over Big Tech’s slop generators, which are being weaponized against them. Where chatbots extrude untrustworthy slop, journalists meticulously investigate and fact check.

This is something to build on. A foundation for a strategy to push back and reclaim some eyeballs, and thus power, from Big Tech.

Instead, media organizations keep promoting Google – the company that so eloquently explained how news sites are irrelevant – while helping train the very slop generators that are eating their cake, through Google Preferred Sources. The “Add as preferred source on Google” buttons are showing up on plenty of media sites. Yet again media is pointing eyeballs towards a tech silo.

But it gets worse. A lot of media sites directly provide slop summaries! For example Yahoo! News, with this added warning:

✨ Key takeaways

Powered by Yahoo Scout. Yahoo is using AI to generate key points from this article. This means the info may not always match what’s in the article. (…)

Consider what this signals to the reader: instead of differentiating trustworthy media from untrustworthy Big Tech chatbots, it does the exact opposite. It puts the untrustworthy slop right there in front of the reader on the very news website the reader is already on, and even calls that slop out for being untrustworthy!

A reader might ask: are chatbots as trustworthy as the media organizations, then? If they are, why wouldn’t the reader limit themself to whatever chatbot they are already most used to? No need to visit your site anymore! And no need for Google to even link to it.

Media thus dilute their own trustworthiness, while at the same time improving the perceived trustworthiness of slop generators. Another type of silo emerges, one that even more completely locks the reader in.

And finally, between SEO-optimized clickbait headlines and distracting auto-play videos that are unrelated to the article content, many media websites signal outright hostility – if not contempt – towards the reader and their preferences. The relatively recent (and likely illegal) forced-consent banners only strengthen that feeling. And again, these consent banners are a choice, stemming from other choices – using Google Analytics, showing creepy tracking ads, and so on.

In fact, trust itself has been outsourced to the gatekeepers.

X/Twitter’s checkmarks, formerly highly-coveted by journalists and a point of pride as a sign of clout, turned into a meaningless rent extraction scheme. Journalists gave a corporate platform the power to decide who’s trustworthy and who is not, and now they literally and figuratively pay the price.

And yet you persist there. After Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency killed your funding, after the hand gesture, after Grok-generated child sexual abuse materials scandal, after Musk called an interviewer “a traitor to the west” for pointed questions, and fantasized about killing other journalists.

Can it be any more clear that Musk and his platfom sees you, the media, as his enemy? How can people trust you if you stay there? What would it take for you to leave? Is there anything at all?

✨ Key Takeaways¶

I know you’re still there because “everyone else is”. But this works both ways: for how many of your readers you being there is the reason they stay? For how many fellow journalists? For how many politicians?

Your very existence on these toxic platforms lends them credibility and builds their importance. You bear responsibility for where you point the eyeballs.

Here’s the good news: you helped push people into these toxic places, so you can lead them out of there. You can close your accounts, or at least you can limit your posting there. You can point the eyeballs elsewhere.

Even if you stay in some of the silos, the way you use them matters. Are you pulling more people into them? Or are you crafting your use such that it pulls people out of them?

But remember there are no silver bullets. Interrogate the power dynamics of new tools you use and promote. Do they lend themselves to gatekeeping? Are the companies or organizations behind them trustworthy? Is switching a provider easy in case your current one becomes problematic?

Newsletters are making a comeback. That’s great, as long as we’re not talking about wannabe silos like Substack.

You wouldn’t publish an article without thoroughly investigating and fact-checking it. Why not apply the same standard to tech companies and services you use and promote?

The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, an investigative outlet I had worked at during Panama Papers, recently announced a “strategic partnership” with W Social. If they did apply the same standard of investigation and fact-checking as I know they do to their stories, they would perhaps learn that W Social is basically a fork of Bluesky, a US-based social media platform. I don’t want to bore you with technicalities but this basically means W Social is dependent on some of Bluesky’s infrastructure. While branding themselves as a “European” social network.

They also use misleading messaging to pretend Eurosky – another Bluesky fork – does not exist. Not to mention the Fediverse.

OCCRP would also learn that the company artificially manipulates comment counts to make it look more active – which does not exactly sit well with W Social’s tagline, “trust your feed”. We know this, again, because W Social is a fork of Bluesky and so you can get access to the same data via Bluesky.

Finally, speaking of Bluesky… if one were to in turn do some due diligence on them, one would learn it’s another VC-funded company, whose main investor is Blockchain Capital. Technologically, Bluesky is really trying to create a silo that doesn’t immediately look like a silo, but will inevitably end up being one.

After all, venture capital expects massive return on investment. And competition is for losers. So, silos are the name of the game.

Thirteen years ago I was warning against silos, specifically calling out Facebook and Twitter. And Google+, which is pretty quaint today. Today I am warning you about Bluesky and its forks, like W Social. I am warning you about Substack. I am warning you about LLMs.

I am begging you to pay attention to the red flags, critically scrutinize tech companies and services they offer, and make the difficult decisions that might be required to not fall into the same traps again.

You are spending your time, energy, money and trust capital to get people from one silo to another. You are promoting the very systems whose purpose is to make journalism irrelevant. The way this ends is very predictable. As it was with everything else I talked today about.

How do you know if a tech service is a potential silo? If the question of “I need to be there because others are there” makes any sense in the context of a single provider, it is one. What are the power dynamics? Are there other providers? What happens if the owner pulls a Musk? Can it be owned at all? Who is the owner? What is their track record? Follow the money!

Also, can we have RSS/Atom feeds, please? There is no reason why feed readers can’t make a comeback and become first-class citizens on our devices. You can help make that world happen, and you will regain another direct channel without a gatekeeper, and without having to roll (and then maintain) your own mobile app.

Incidentally, podcasts are based around RSS/Atom feeds. “Wherever you get your podcasts” is a revolutionary statement.

Talk about protocols, not platforms. Public debate needs public spaces, not private shopping malls. Regain trust, reclaim eyeballs, and hopefully money will follow.

We need strong, independent, resilient journalism. That is not going to happen as long as techbros are in the driver’s seat. The sooner media organizations understand that and start acting on that, the better.

We can’t afford another decade of this.