Big Tech's Siege on Journalism

Canadians may have missed it, but Meta, the parent company for Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads, blatantly attacked journalism at the beginning of April. The company nuked all links to the Kansas Reflector, a non-profit news organization, after a critical article was posted.

Forbes did a great rundown of the origins of the nonsense, but long story short, Meta's platforms blocked a Reflector link critical of the company. After that, journalist Marisa Kabas wrote about it on her site The Handbasket. Then all links to Kabas' website were blocked, and Kabas herself was briefly blocked from posting on Threads.

Later, the Reflector reported that the blocks may have been due to Facebook's internal artificial intelligence. Even if this is the case, which the parent company of the Reflector notes is consistent with their internal investigation, this allows Meta to buck responsibility for attacking journalism. Instead of being held accountable for taking down news links, representatives point to nebulous and impenetrable system.

Us Canadians are very familiar with Meta's animosity towards news. But this latest instance, while important to cover, is just a distilled example of how social platforms have laid siege on journalism.

Operating the Siege Engine

Antipathy towards news, as a concept, has cemented itself in the online platforms that dominate our everyday lives. Canada is well aware of the news ban on Meta platforms, but the effect is only recently being measured. News in the shape of memes have replaced actual news. This is bad, especially for Canadians, but good for Meta. It doesn't matter what drives engagement and retention as long as it's there. Meta has seen the benefits of moving away from news in Canada. and are considering taking similar steps in Australia. While they previously played ball with the country's news compensation, they're planning to end payments in the country.

Meta is hardly alone. Though Elon Musk, owner of Twitter, has never shied away from his hatred of critical media, X (formerly known as Twitter) was caught pushing a fake headline generated by its own chatbot in its trending news section.

AI supercharging this animosity is a common theme. Back in January, Google News was caught boosting AI news generated-articles that ripped off work done by actual journalists. But now that California is looking to implement similar legislation to Canada, Google is blocking links to California news outlets on their search. The move, while temporary, shows that the news that helped make these companies valuable in their early days has become a liability.

Returning to Meta, when Threads launched, Instagram head Adam Mosseri said the micro-blogging site would not amplify news. Then, earlier this year, Instagram quietly defaulted settings to prevent accounts from viewing "political content." The move was recently slammed by a collection of creators on the platform in an open letter. "Stopping people from seeing suggested political content poses a serious threat to political engagement, education, and activism," the letter reads.

Instagram's move warrants criticism, but it's erroneous to believe that Instagram gives a shit about "political engagement, education, and activism." As big tech has uniformly shown, they are intentionally starving news of reach and, by extension, revenue.

Supercharging Ignorance

The topic has been covered before. The Atlantic tried to be the sombre "voice of reason" by pointing to lower readership, and overall interest, as contributing factors to social media's overall devaluing of news. While the point is a valuable one, bemoaning a lack of trust in news when one of your most prominent voices pushed Bush's War on Terror is a sad joke. Regardless, while credibility of the news industry is famously in decline, to separate this from social media's attacks on news is faulty

In a piece in The Conversation, news researcher Merja Myllylahti examined this break from social media assault on news. "Newsrooms will likely have to say goodbye to platformed publishing and social media news distribution," Myllyahti writes.

This distribution came hand in hand with chasing engagement on social platforms. But now the platforms that contributed to the credibility crisis are moving away from this model. As a result, news agencies are left with all of the consequences of falling trust– and none of the market power the platforms have, which was cultivated off their work. Without this incentive, few avenues remain for outlets that don't have name recognition like the New York Times, The Guardian or The Globe and Mail.

You've likely seen a massive push for engagement at all costs in your own feeds lately. Every big platform is seemingly converging on TikTok style video content. Ads are increasingly intrusive (especially on YouTube). Suggested content is prioritized over the accounts you choose to follow. Google searches are turning up garbage while Search Engine Optimization (SEO) hollows out content further. I'd argue the mainstream internet is worse than it's ever been, frankly.

All of these terrible moves are done for one reason: to increase company value. With higher engagement comes better metrics for advertisers and more cohesive datasets to sell to the highest bidder. It doesn't matter that, on the user side, higher engagement means things like AI Shrimp Jesus taking over Facebook feeds while AI spam bots flood everywhere on X (formerly known as Twitter). When engagement's the only metric that matters, quality suffers drastically. What does this have to do with abandoning news? Allowing AI engagement bait is cheaper than paying news agencies. It's also far more lucrative.

Fixing the Problem

While this doesn't spell the end of journalism, this shift shouldn't be seen as the invisible hand of the market moving in mysterious ways. This is a deliberate and sustained attack on the ability to disseminate information to the public.

We have to think outside the neoliberal retort that private companies are "allowed to do what they want." In many ways, these big tech companies dictate much of society and must be held accountable. It's telling that Meta faced virtually zero consequences, directly or indirectly, for completely pulling news from their platforms in Canada. Our government has the legislative tools to coerce companies like Meta to either pay more, or pull-out entirely. At this point, Meta leaving shouldn't even be considered a loss. In the event it does, a public alternative must also be pursued.

This siege on journalism is only going to worsen. Starving critical outlets of traffic not only benefits the numbers of these internet giants, but weakens the structures that could criticize their operation. It's especially aggravating seeing AI take an outsized role in banning some of these critical voices. But this state of things isn't inevitable. We should imagine a world where big tech platforms don't dictate the population's media diet. It can be done, even if our governments have no interest in pursuing that scenario.