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At some point over the past few years, Facebook stopped being a mostly harmless social network filled with baby photos, and became one of the most powerful forces in media—an entity unlike any the world has ever seen, with more than two billion users every day and a growing stranglehold on the advertising market that used to underpin most of the media industry.

When it comes to threats that journalism faces, in other words, Facebook clearly deserves to be on the list, whether it wants to admit it or not. It has taken over most of the distribution system news outlets used to control, and along with that has come billions of dollars in ad revenue—revenue that media companies once relied on to fund their journalism.

Facebook “is already a significant threat and it has been for awhile,” says Martin Nisenholtz, former head of digital strategy for the New York Times. “Along with Google, it is absorbing most of the growth in the digital marketplace.”

In many ways, Facebook’s relationship with media is the classic Faustian bargain: Media outlets want to reach those two billion users, so they put as much of their content as they can on the network. In some cases, they even create whole teams of journalists to create content that Facebook wants, including video. And they are rewarded by the all-powerful Facebook algorithm.

And what do they get in return? The chance to show people their journalism and hope that they can either convince someone to sign up for a subscription, or that they can survive on the pennies worth of advertising revenue generated by their Facebook content.

Even some of the digital-only media entities who have built their businesses on Facebook and catered to its every whim don’t seem to be able to make this equation work. Mashable, which laid off much of its news staff to focus on video for Facebook, is being acquired by Ziff Davis for 20 percent of what it was valued at a year ago, and BuzzFeed has reportedly missed its revenue targets.

Facebook, on the other hand, only reinforces its status as the destination for news by aggregating increasing amounts of it from desperate partners. One recent study found that almost half of the people who got news on Facebook couldn’t remember the original source of the content. In other words, Facebook is slowly replacing media outlets as the brand people associate with news.

The long-term threat goes beyond just getting paid in pennies for producing the content Facebook wants. As digital advertising weakens as a source of revenue—thanks to Google and Facebook’s growing control—media companies are having to rely more subscriptions. But the readers they want to reach are all on Facebook consuming content for free.

The largest journalistic outlets—places like the New York Times, the Washington Post or the Guardian—have the kinds of international brands that will allow them to continue to be advertising destinations, and also get the lion’s share of subscriptions. Media entities that are small and highly targeted may also find enough loyal fans to survive on subscriptions.

But where does that leave the mid-market metro newspaper, which doesn’t have the scale or the reach to mimic the New York Times, but has lost much of its grip on the local market because of chain ownership? Even if Facebook helps with either of those problems, a paper like that risks becoming just another commodity supplier of content to the massive social platform.

“The brutal truth for publishers is that, absent the cost structure and differentiation necessary to create a sustainable destination site that users visit directly, they have no choice but to bend to Facebook’s wishes,” technology analyst Ben Thompson wrote earlier this year. “Given how inexpensive it is to produce content on the Internet, someone else is more than willing to take your share of attention.”

Not only are commodity suppliers usually unable to demand very much in the form of compensation, but they can also be replaced easily—or they might be asked to pay Facebook for the right to reach the users they originally reached for free, something the network has done in the past.

“Facebook seems to be moving towards creating a more robust and curated vertical [for news], and that means they’ll decide which brands they are going to elevate and which they will filter out,” says Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center at Columbia. “There’s an ethical view that this is a terrible state of affairs, since it means that Facebook effectively decides which media outlets survive and which don’t.”

In a recent speech, author Dan Gillmor described a future in which “we will be living in the ecosystem of a company that has repeatedly demonstrated its untrustworthiness, an enterprise that would become the primary newsstand for journalism and would be free to pick the winners via special deals with media people and tweaks of its opaque algorithms. If this is the future, we are truly screwed.”

The nature of the threat from Facebook can be broken down into two general categories, the most significant of which is economic: Since many media companies, particularly more traditional publishers, still rely on advertising revenue to support their journalism, Facebook’s increasing dominance of that industry poses an existential threat to their business model.

According to a recent estimate by media investment firm GroupM, Google and Facebook will account for close to 85 percent of the global digital ad market this year and will take more than 185 percent of the growth in that market—meaning other players will shrink. “This is exceedingly bad news for the balance of the digital publisher ecosystem,” the firm says.

Is any of this Facebook’s fault? Not really. It and Google came up with a more effective way of reaching potential consumers, particularly on mobile. Media companies have failed to adapt quickly enough to digital in general or to mobile, so in some ways they have themselves to blame.

“Did God give us that [advertising] revenue? No,” says CUNY journalism professor Jeff Jarvis. “It wasn’t our money, it was our customers’ money, and Facebook and Google came along and offered them a better deal.” The problem, says Jarvis (whose recently launched News Integrity Project counts Facebook as a major donor) is that “we didn’t change our business models. We insist on maintaining the mass media business model, and that’s more of a problem than social media.”

This doesn’t mean Facebook isn’t still a threat. But it isn’t a threat because Mark Zuckerberg wants to somehow destroy the media industry. It’s like an elephant stepping on an ant—the threat to journalism and to media in general is just something that is happening while Facebook is going about its business.

“Facebook is a threat not necessarily because it’s evil but because it does what it does very well, which is to target people for advertisers,” says Nisenholtz. “Look at BuzzFeed and its latest revenue shortfall, assuming it’s true. There is no company that has done more in a sense to serve Facebook as a content provider and even they’re not achieving their goals.” The question, he says, is “has it become so dominant now that it’s become essentially a monopoly, and if so what should publishers do about it?”

In addition to the economic threat that is taking out journalism’s business model, Facebook also arguably poses a threat to the journalism itself. Into this bucket we can throw things like fake news and misinformation, which works primarily because Facebook focuses on engagement—time spent, clicks and sharing—rather than more substantive measures of quality or value.

In many ways, sociologists say, Facebook is a machine designed to encourage confirmation bias, which is the human desire to believe (and share) things that confirm our existing beliefs about a person or issue, even if they are untrue. As a former Facebook product manager put it: “The news feed optimizes for engagement [and] as we’ve learned in this election, bullshit is highly engaging.”

Facebook has announced a number of attempts to fix its misinformation problem, including a fact-checking project that adds the “disputed” tag to stories that have been flagged by partners. But those efforts have been consistently overshadowed by evidence that some of Facebook’s problems are baked into the platform. For example, research by the Tow Center at Columbia earlier this year showed that posts created by a notorious Russian troll factory were shared hundreds of millions of times.

As journalism entrepreneur David Cohn argued in a blog post earlier this year, Facebook’s main purpose is not information so much as it is identity, and the construction by users of a public identity that matches the group or tribe they wish to belong to. This is why fake news is so powerful.

“The headline isn’t meant to inform somebody about the world,” says Cohn. “The headline is a tool to be used by a person to inform others about who they are. ‘This is me,’ they say when they share that headline. “This is what I believe. This shows what tribe I belong to.’ It is virtue signaling.”

Some of the company’s problems when it comes to news are exacerbated by the fact that, despite some of Facebook’s modest attempts to support news and journalism in a variety of ways over the past year or two, it still isn’t a core focus, and may never be one.

There’s no question that news has become more important to the company than it used to be. Zuckerberg has gone from saying it was “a crazy idea” to suggest that fake news affected the US election to admitting that Facebook does play a role in the dissemination of misinformation, and that Russian troll factories used the platform to try to meddle in the election.

Facebook also supports a range of well-meaning journalistic efforts, including its Facebook Journalism Project, which is aimed at helping newsrooms get more digitally savvy, and the News Integrity Initiative, which Jarvis launched earlier this year with funding from Facebook and a group of other donors.

Former insiders at Facebook, however, say these efforts are primarily designed to be public relations vehicles for the social network, as it tries to stay ahead of federal regulators and others who might want to impose legal restrictions on what it can and cannot do.

“Throwing money at things is a band-aid,” said a former staffer. “They’re not grappling with the real problems their dominance is causing. I left because it became frustrating to know that they weren’t taking seriously the impact they were having on journalism and the news. Not because they’re evil, they’re just much more nimble, and smarter.”

Whether Facebook’s funding efforts are primarily PR gestures (which doesn’t mean they are not doing worthwhile things), the point is that if Facebook cares about these issues at all, it isn’t doing enough to change them. And the reason for that is the same as the reason why Google’s efforts along the same lines tend to be ineffective: Because ultimately they don’t affect the core business of the company, which is to generate as much advertising revenue as possible.

A Google News employee once said that ideas about how to improve it were encouraged, but never got the kind of traction they needed to because they were seen as tangential to the company’s main business. This is a problem at many Silicon Valley companies, where engineering and revenue are seen as the most important, not intangible topics like social value.

Former Facebook employees say the engineering driven, “move fast and break things” approach worked when the company was smaller but now gets in the way of understanding the societal problems it faces. It’s one thing to break a product, but if you move fast and break democracy or move fast and break journalism, how do you measure the broader impact of that?

“I think there’s a possibility that they just don’t know what to do” about any of these larger problems, says Nisenholtz. “I think there’s a chance they don’t have the people in their organization or the DNA to even understand what is going on or what to do about it. I’m fundamentally optimistic about Facebook’s desire to help, but I’m not as optimistic about its ability to help.”

Jarvis, however, believes Facebook does care. “I’ve talked to Chris Cox, the head of product at Facebook, and I believe he cares deeply about news. I think Mark Zuckerberg cares. We have to reinvent journalism… and we should be doing it in partnership with Facebook and Google because they’re a lot fucking smarter about it than we are.”

As much of a threat as Facebook currently represents for the media industry, there are those who believe it could actually get worse. One way it could do so is by continuing to vacuum up even more of the advertising market, to the point where ads are no longer a viable revenue source for media companies at all. For some, that would mean going from ads contributing as much as 60 percent of the revenue to zero.

“The best thing is to have a traditional business and brand but still be flexible and digital,” says Emily Bell. “But there are places where it isn’t really working, like local. There are parts of the media business model that are just broken, like the advertising business—the distribution bottleneck is gone. What the new journalistic business looks like that can not just survive but thrive in this new world we haven’t really figured it out yet.”

Could advertising disappear completely as a viable revenue source? Jason Kint of Digital Content Next—a lobby group that includes some of the largest media brands in the country—says he sees Google and Facebook continuing to dominate “programmatic” or automated advertising. But he believes there is still the potential for other forms of advertising to continue generating revenue for media companies.

Others are much more pessimistic. “Either the advertising business as we know it goes away, or you survive as a media outlet because you are in Facebook’s favor, either algorithmically or otherwise,” says one veteran journalist, who didn’t want his name used because he has to work with Facebook. “There’s no precedent in terms of the size and dominance of it as a media entity, and no one has any idea what to do about it. We are in uncharted territory here.”

There’s another way the Facebook threat could actually get worse: Instead of continuing to be a primary platform for news companies and trying to strike relationships with them, the company could decide to simply wash its hands of news entirely, whether because it isn’t generating enough revenue, or because it has become too much of a political minefield.

For Facebook, it has to be distracting to devote so much of its time and energy to Congressional sub-committees or European Union directives. And for all its attempts to help media companies with revenue sharing or fact-checking, it gets criticized repeatedly for not doing enough.

Moving away from news wouldn’t have to mean getting rid of all news content entirely. It could take the form of a split news feed, one where the majority of content in the main feed is related to personal relationships a user has, and a separate feed includes news articles or content from news brands.

We got a glimpse of what that might look like earlier this year, when Facebook tested a split feed in several Asian and Eastern European countries. News outlets who work in those countries said they saw their traffic from the social network decline by as much as 60 percent overnight.

Ironically, some criticized Facebook for these experiments, because they said the company was messing around with what has become a key source of news for people in struggling democracies like Cambodia, where traditional media is untrustworthy. In many ways, this reinforced the power that Facebook has developed over news consumption not just in the US but around the world.

Could they decide just to give up on news, or relegate it to the sidelines? “I feel like there’s a real chance that they might just decide it’s too much trouble, too much of a PR mess, and they’re not even making that much money from it to begin with,” said one former staffer. “But the genie is kind of out of the bottle now. I’m not sure they can go back at this point.”

The reality is that, in order to really come to grips with what its size and influence have wrought both in journalism and society at large, the company is going to have to not only change its outlook but possibly also its culture. The “move fast and break things” ethos is no longer working, and if anything is holding Facebook back from doing the kinds of things that are required.

The company didn’t set out to kill anything, including media, a former insider says. “Zuck is just a very competitive guy, and he wanted to build the largest company he could. And now he’s won. But they don’t know how to deal with it.” In a way, Facebook is like a band of revolutionaries who don’t know what to do once they topple the dictator and actually become the government.

“Facebook is going to be an important institution, even if it decides it doesn’t want to actually produce journalism,” says Bell. “If it’s here to stay, it needs to be part of figuring this problem out. My worry is that they only see things in market terms, so it’s all about market share. And my biggest fear is that they just sort of give up, and decide it’s just not part of their core vision.”

In that sense, the threat posed by Facebook gobbling up all of the advertising and media content for its own purposes may only be eclipsed by the threat of the company getting out of the business of helping news companies at all, leaving many of them naked and shivering in the cold of a new economic reality.

Reddit is often dismissed as the digital version of a noisy bar brawl between nerds and misfits, and it has had its share of bad press in the past, thanks to the activities of trolls and offensive sub-Reddits. But when it comes to issues like net neutrality, the site has a way of highlighting not just what’s important about the web but also what average citizens of the Internet can do about it, something few mainstream media outlets tend to do.

Last week, for example, when Federal Communications Commission chairman Ajit Pai announced his intention to loosen the existing rules on net neutrality, most traditional news sites published “explainers” describing what net neutrality is and why some believe it to be an important way of protecting Internet freedom. Most of these (with a few exceptions) were were of the standard “one side says this, the other side says that” format.

The front page of Reddit, meanwhile — which normally contains a wide variety of links vying for up-votes from members, from funny GIFs to personal stories — contained an almost unbroken stream of posts about net neutrality, and specifically, the senators and representatives who had failed to defend the principle.

Net neutrality activists just took over Reddit with protest posts https://t.co/AdwzVldDtw pic.twitter.com/ncR2RsvjPp

— Cory Doctorow @[email protected] (@doctorow) December 1, 2017

Each of these posts was phrased in a similar way, starting with “Senator X sold me out to the telecom industry for $X,” then listing the amount of political donations from cable or telco companies that each representative had received. According to Reddit, the site’s editors didn’t rig the algorithm in order to set up the front page this way, its members did so by up-voting those posts more than others. And that wasn’t the only day it happened.

These protest posts didn’t come out of nowhere. The site’s co-founders, Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, have written multiple posts over the past few months calling on members to express their support for the principle, and to take concrete action in other ways as well, including phoning their representatives and talking about why net neutrality matters. And Redditors have responded in droves — in a single week the site saw 50,000 posts with over 350,000 comments that generated more than 21 million votes.

In July, Ohanian wrote that the central idea behind the creation of Reddit was to build “an open platform for communities and their members to find and discuss the content they found most interesting,” but that any future attempts to build such a thing could be threatened by the disappearance of net neutrality protections.

As Ohanian noted with his “we’ve been here before” comment, in some ways Reddit has been training for this moment for years. It was a significant player in the protests in 2012 that helped defeat both SOPA and PIPA, two proposed bills that would have significantly limited freedom of speech online. And Reddit has stood alongside groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU in opposing other similar efforts.

Much like any online community with 250 million members, Reddit contains a broad range of viewpoints, including those who are pro-Trump. But there’s no question that the majority of the site’s users see neutrality as a principle worth fighting for: Ohanian said his post on the issue was one of the most viewed and most up-voted posts in the site’s history. Even the top-rated post in a sub-Reddit about car racing was about net neutrality.

it looks like @reddit users are organizing and literally calling out their Members of Congress on #NetNeutrality . No big deal, it is only the 5th most visited website in America. pic.twitter.com/7Fd0ucYvgh

— Ernesto Falcon (@ErnestoOFalcon) December 1, 2017

One thing Reddit does well is to bring individual users to the forefront of such issues — so for example, Huffman mentioned in a follow-up post last week how the site had contacted a congressman from Pennsylvania and shared stories from users about the importance of net neutrality.

Those responses came as replies to a post asking users to answer the question: “How would your life change if internet service providers started blocking or throttling certain internet traffic, or creating paid prioritization channels for certain content?”

It’s worth noting that a frequent criticism of traditional media outlets is that they are happy to write news articles about how important a topic is, but they rarely provide any way for readers to take action on those issues. Reddit does this in spades (as do groups such as the ACLU and EFF), including providing lists of congressional phone numbers and addresses, tips on protest methods, etc.

In an important way, what makes Reddit so powerful on issues like net neutrality, ironically, is that it doesn’t have to stick to the neutral or objective position that most media outlets feel they need to uphold. Since in many ways it is an expression of the interests of its members (although Ohanian and Huffman have tried to rein those interests in to remove some of the more offensive elements of the community), it can speak with one voice.

For media purists, this might seem antithetical to journalism. But many believe that one of the core principles of journalism is to “speak truth to power,” and that’s difficult to do when you are saying “on the one hand this, on the other hand that” (something NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen likes to call the View From Nowhere).

That’s not to say Reddit doesn’t also play host to more traditionally objective forms of journalism: The site’s Syrian War sub-Reddit, to take just one example, has been a good example of how Reddit can be used as a news curation tool around complex issues, compiling resources and links that are as informative as any mainstream outlet (if not more so) and in many cases doing so much faster.

More than anything else, Reddit’s power on topics like net neutrality comes from the fact that it isn’t a media entity in the normal sense, but a community that also publishes. In a broad sense it is a social network like Facebook or Twitter, but because of its history as a tech-focused news site, its members are much more likely to come together on such issues, and Reddit encourages that deliberately in a thousand different ways.

Somewhere in there is a lesson for media outlets of all kinds, particularly at a time when the future of media seems to rest on connecting with a loyal readership and encouraging them to support you directly rather than relying on whatever scraps of advertising revenue aren’t vacuumed up by Google and Facebook.

There are plenty of startups trying to reinvent how the news business works by adding features such as micro-payments or setting their sights on becoming “the iTunes of news.” But a startup called Civil is trying to take a quantum leap beyond all of these efforts: It’s not just inventing its own platform for news and journalism, it’s also inventing its own currency and its own monetary system at the same time.

Civil, which was founded by Matthew Iles last year, is building what it hopes will be an open marketplace for journalists, scheduled to launch in the spring of 2018. The building blocks of the project are blockchains and a bespoke crypto-currency, a system of “tokens” that Civil has created that will both fund the development of the platform and be used as compensation for writers and editors who take part in the marketplace.

What he’s trying to create, Iles says, is a marketplace for independent journalism where the individuals who create that journalism are funded directly by their readers, as well as the broader Civil community. Crypto-currency is just a way of making those payments easier, and of giving members a stake in something that might increase in value.

In a sense, it’s like a newspaper company giving its journalists shares in the corporation along with their salary, except that both the shares and the salary are composed of a new kind of currency. And Civil is no doubt hoping it can generate more value than the shares of newspaper companies have.

The company outlined its vision in a June manifesto about “self-sustaining journalism,” as well as a white paper published in October. “With open governance and cryptoeconomics, we can create a sustainable place for journalism?—even the kind of local, policy and investigative journalism that has been most eroded. Decentralization is the key to a free and independent press,” the company said.

The whole idea of crypto-currencies has become hugely popular—every day there are reports about the soaring value of Bitcoin, and news about startups launching “initial coin offerings” instead of equity IPOs. But at the same time, the technology behind these new currencies is still poorly understood by many.

Iles admits that both the hype level around Bitcoin and the complicated nature of the technology present a marketing challenge, in the sense that Civil has to simultaneously explain itself and its reason for being while also trying to explain what a crypto-currency and the blockchain are.

“The hype is definitely both helping and hurting,” Iles says. “I used to have to start conversations with ‘Have you heard of blockchain?’ Now everyone’s heard of it, but the downside is that it has become associated with hype and the crypto bubble etc.” The bottom line, Iles says, is that “it’s just a piece of software.” Much like the Internet itself, it can be used for both good things and bad things. Civil hopes to be one of the good things.

When talking to journalists about why they might want to use or become a member of Civil, Iles says he tells them the platform “offers them the ability to find newsrooms that they can connect with, job possibilities—whether freelance or contract — as well as colleagues and collaborative opportunities. It just happens to be funded and paid in a new way.”

Crypto-currencies are a computer-generated alternative to traditional monetary systems, which rely on governments to back them. Bitcoin, the first crypto-currency, was created in 2009 by a programmer named Satoshi Nakamoto (widely believed to be a pseudonym), who described his vision of a peer-to-peer currency. Now there are dozens of different variations, including Ethereum, Litecoin and Dash.

Instead of being dictated by governments, the value in a crypto-currency system comes from computers that perform a series of complicated calculations in order to create new coins, a process known “mining.” The results of this process are recorded in what’s called the “blockchain,” a cryptographically secure ledger that keeps track of every transaction and can be seen by any user. Only a finite number of coins can be created, to prevent inflation.

Civil’s infrastructure, including its version of a crypto-currency, is based on Ethereum. When the platform launches in the spring, it will do an “initial coin offering” that will give its staff—including a number of independent journalists the company is in the process of signing up as members—an ownership stake. And that currency or tokens will also be used to pay journalists who distribute their content through Civil.

Iles says he originally got a journalism degree but then got pulled into marketing. He and his wife created a digital marketing company they later sold, and he started looking for something else to do.

“I had continued to follow the discussions around the state of journalism, and I was struck by how far off the mark everyone was as far as the next thing that was going to save journalism,” Iles says. “No one went to the root cause, which was that journalism needed a new business model. The leading digital advertising companies were the distribution point, and they were just continuing the spiral journalism was going down.”

As he learned more about Bitcoin, Iles says he became convinced that it provided the opportunity to reinvent journalism for the Internet era, and to wean the industry off what he believed was a toxic reliance on advertising.

“I thought we’ve wrapped the world in beams of light with the Internet, and that structure should be a boon to journalism, and free and independent journalism for that matter,” says Iles. “I thought we needed to think more radically, that the existing business model couldn’t just be tweaked back into the service of journalism.”

Civil has raised a total of $5 million from a fund called Consensus Systems that specializes in crypto-currency investments, including a startup called Ujo that is focused on bringing blockchain to the music business.

Maria Bustillos, a writer whose work has appeared in the New Yorker and the New York Times, is one of those who has signed on to be part of the platform, where she will be running a Civil-based digital magazine called Popula. Among the writers she has lined up are Sasha Frere-Jones, a former writer for the New Yorker.

“I’ve been writing about Bitcoin for a long time,” says Bustillos, “and the more I thought about it the more I thought it could be used for our profession.” With the distributed nature of the blockchain ledger, she says, “there would never be fake news—you’d always be able to verify that someone published something. However many people want to join the network, you would have that many cyber-witnesses.”

The other aspect of the blockchain, she says, is that it could help preserve journalistic archives in a way that would make them impossible to delete, something media companies often do after going out of business, or when they are sued. Google has also removed links to articles after lawsuits involving the European “right to be forgotten.”

“We could remove the ability for billionaires and advertisers to threaten what people write any more,” Bustillos says, because a copy of the archives would be held on the computer of everyone who became a part of the platform. The Popula founder says she is working on incorporating a project called the Interplanetary File System, an attempt to build a massively distributed network of computers to store documents.

When an editor accepts a pitch or assigns a story using Civil, Iles says, the two will discuss payment just as editors and journalists always do, but in this case the editor might offer a number of different forms of compensation. It might be a specific number of Civil coins or tokens, but it could also be a percentage of the increase in value in the crypto-currency over a period of time following the publication of the article.

The assumption, Iles says, is that creating good content and building a community of users around that content will increase the value of the underlying tokens. And he says Civil is being very careful to make sure that its version of an ICO doesn’t get swept up in the hype surrounding all things Bitcoin.

“Given the hype, there would have been plenty of opportunity for us to launch a token off a white paper and raise a bunch of money as some others have,” Iles says. “But that would’ve created a speculative market just to take advantage of a land-grab. W’re taking the long road—we want to launch a real working product with our token, and we will be one of the first crypto-currency platforms of its kind to do that.”

In the same way crowd-funding platforms show potential donors as much information as possible about the project they are funding and what they will get in return for the different tiers of donation, Civil will be as transparent a marketplace as possible, Iles says. Members and journalists alike will be able to see what the current market value of a token is, the increase or decrease over time, and other details about the marketplace.

So what if someone from Breitbart News wanted to create a journalistic outlet or marketplace on the platform? “Civil does not have editorial oversight, as long as members are abiding by ethical guidelines,” says Iles. “We want to decentralize the adjudication of those kinds of decisions to the community.” But Civil will ensure that the content published on its service is “accurate and ethically reported,” he says.

Iles said Civil is talking to a number of other independent journalists like Bustillos about setting up virtual magazines or news entities based on the platform, and the company is also working on partnerships with several large traditional media entities who are thinking about experimenting with the model.

Venture-capital funding can often be a double-edged sword for startups. It allows them to grow quickly without having to worry about profitability, but it also arguably encourages them to take irrational risks–including some that ultimately turn out to be fatal–in order to produce the kind of large returns that VC funds rely on.

The dilemma that this can create for media companies in particular was thrown into sharp relief earlier this month when a trifecta of news came out about some of the most high-profile digital-media ventures of the last decade. Here are the highlights:

— BuzzFeed is on track to miss its revenue targets by as much as 20 percent, according to a recent report by the Wall Street Journal. The company had been talking about a public share offering next year, but analysts say an IPO is likely on hold due to its lackluster financial performance. After its most recent financing round in 2016, an investment of $200 million from NBCUniversal that doubled the Comcast subsidiary’s holdings in the company, BuzzFeed had a valuation of $1.7 billion. As analysts noted at the time, this number wasn’t much larger than what the company was worth in 2015, which suggested that it wasn’t growing quickly enough to justify a higher value.

— Mashable has agreed to sell itself to Ziff Davis for about $50 million, according to reports from both the Journal and Bloomberg. That’s less than one quarter of what the company was worth as recently as last year, when it closed a $15-million round of funding from Time Warner. Not long afterward, Mashable laid off most of its news team, and “pivoted” to focus on video, a change driven in part by Facebook’s seemingly insatiable demand for video content. Mashable, which founder Pete Cashmore started in his home in Aberdeen in 2005 at the age of 19, has been rumored to be looking for a buyer for some time.

— Vice is also likely to miss revenue targets for this year, according to several reports. It had a market value of $5.7 billion earlier this year after private equity firm TPG invested $450 million in the company. Disney also has a significant stake, having invested $400 million in 2015 (giving Vice a market value of about $4 billion at the time), as in addition to a $250-million investment made in 2014 through A&E Networks, a partnership between Disney and Hearst. Vice has talked in the past about possibly doing an initial public share offering, but it has also named Disney as a potential acquirer.

Amid all the angst fuelled by these revelations, there was a glimmer of good news from Axios, a startup run by Politico co-founder Jim VandeHei, which said it had raised $20 million from investors including Lerer Partners (also an investor in BuzzFeed) and NBCUniversal. But will Axios’s funding ultimately lead to disappointment?

Obviously, BuzzFeed and Vice aren’t failures by any normal definition of that word. They have hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and are theoretically worth billions of dollars. Skeptics, however, will note that those billions are private-market valuations–notional value that can disappear in an instant, as it has in Mashable’s case–and that neither one appears to be anywhere close to turning a profit.

Is any of this venture capital’s fault? That depends on who you talk to. Although CUNY journalism professor Jeff Jarvis celebrated Axios taking venture funding, others were not quite so quick to say VC is always good for media startups.

I'm not sure VC money is good news. Why are you?

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) November 17, 2017

Talking Points Memo founder Josh Marshall says much of the investment in media companies was driven by false expectations, but now “investors are realizing that scale cannot replicate the kind of business model lock-in, price premiums and revenue stability people thought it would.” The bottom line, Marshall says, is that “the future that VCs and other investors were investing hundreds of millions of dollars in probably doesn’t exist.”

BuzzFeed, for example, built a business dedicated at least in part to producing content, including video, that would work well on Facebook. But the returns on that content appear to be much lower than expected. Is that because the expectations BuzzFeed and its investors had were too high, or did Facebook make changes that undermined those expectations? Or did the landscape change in other ways?

At one point, the company was said to be projecting revenues of as much as $500 million for last year, but it was forced to scale those forecasts back and likely pulled in about half that amount. For this year, BuzzFeed executives were reportedly looking for growth of 35 percent but the company appears to have achieved dramatically less than that.

BuzzFeed missing revenue targets by 20% doesn't make it a bad business. It's just not a big business. Hard for me to see/believe in path for huge $$$. I wouldn't invest at its valuation. I still like the company and it'll be successful – just a more moderate $$$ success.

— Ted Williams (@ted_williams) November 17, 2017

If the Journal is correct, BuzzFeed likely increased its revenues by less than 10 percent to about $280 million. That’s not a great performance for a company that is seen as a fast-growing digital superstar, and it makes its alleged $1.7 billion value look awfully rich. One of the bets that VCs made was that digital-media companies like BuzzFeed could grow at rates similar to technology startups, and could therefore justify the same kinds of valuations, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.

As for Vice, co-founder and CEO Shane Smith has said multiple times over the past year that the company had a $1 billion “run rate,” meaning it was on track to generate that much in annual revenue. But according to the Journal, it is expected to only have revenues of about $800 million this year.

As a number of observers noted after the BuzzFeed and Mashable news broke, the reality could be that these businesses are not failures at all, but simply aren’t worth as much as either their founders or investors might have hoped. Part of that could be Facebook’s fault, or the dominance that it and Google exert over the advertising industry. But part of it could also be over-inflated expectations of a pot of gold at the end of the digital-media rainbow.

Misinformation distributed by social platforms like Facebook has become a major issue in the United States, thanks to all the attention focused on Russian troll armies trying to influence the 2016 presidential election. But in some countries, “fake news” doesn’t just interfere with people’s views about who to vote for—it leads to people being arrested, jailed, and in some cases even killed. And Facebook doesn’t seem to be doing a lot about it.

Southeast Asia is one place where the social network is fomenting ethnic and political tensions in dangerous ways, according to a number of journalists who cover the region. This effect can be seen in countries like Thailand and Cambodia, but it has become increasingly severe in Myanmar, where the Rohingya people are being persecuted, driven from their homes and in some cases raped and killed.

“As complicated as Facebook’s impacts on the politics of the United States are, the impact in Asia may be even more tricky, the consequences more severe and the ecosystem less examined, both by Facebook and most people in the US,” says Christina Larson, who has written about the region for a number of outlets including Bloomberg and The Atlantic.

As the situation has escalated over the past six months, observers in Myanmar have reported waves of Facebook-based misinformation and propaganda aimed at fomenting anti-Rohingya fervor, including fabricated reports that families were setting fire to their own homes in an attempt to generate sympathy. More than 600,000 people have been forced from their homes so far, and an untold number have died in the process.

One of the main sources of anti-Rohingya propaganda is Ma Ba Tha, a group of radical Buddhist monks who have been preaching that the Rohingya are less than human, or that they are trying to over-run the country and make everyone into a Muslim. The leader of the group, Ashin Wirathu, has been banned from preaching, but he has been able to spread his message far and wide thanks to an orchestrated Facebook campaign.

Larson and others say the problem is compounded by the fact that a majority of Myanmar residents rely on Facebook for their news. And yet, the level of media literacy is shockingly low, primarily because smartphones and social media are still relatively new.

Until 2014, the digital SIM cards required to use smartphones were prohibitively expensive, because they were only available from the country’s government-controlled telecom carrier. After the industry was opened up, cheap smartphones and $1 SIM cards flooded the market, available from every street vendor—and almost all had Facebook installed by default.

“Facebook has basically become the way that people do everything,” says Paul Mozur, a New York Times reporter who covers Myanmar. “It replaces newspapers, it displaces outreach campaigns by NGOs and other agencies trying to reach people especially in remote areas, it replaces just about everything.”

Wirathu, the leader of the anti-Rohingya movement, used to print out paper pamphlets and flyers to spread his incendiary messages, Mozur says, but now he just posts fake images on Facebook and gets 100 times the reach.

Many of those who have been thrust into this new world of smartphones and social networks in Myanmar “just aren’t used to the level of misinformation or disinformation that’s happening on Facebook,” says Mozur. “Suddenly they’re subject to the full force of an information war coming out of Yangon, orchestrated by much more sophisticated sources, and it’s easy for them to become pawns in that war.”

And what is Facebook doing to help? Not much, some observers say. The social network has relationships with non-government agencies, but only a couple of actual staffers on the ground. “It’s become a bit like an absentee landlord in Southeast Asia,” according to Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch in Asia.

A Facebook spokesman told CJR the company works hard to keep hate speech and content that celebrates or incites violence off the platform, that it is working with non-profit groups in Myanmar to raise awareness of its community standards policies, and that it has local-language pages that offer tips on safety and security.

But still, the problem continues. and it is arguably far more serious than any safety tip guidelines could cover. At one point, Mozur says, messages were spreading on Facebook Messenger that said Muslims were planning an attack on 9/11, and at the same time a separate chain letter said that the Buddhists were planning to attack on the same day.

“I don’t know who was behind those messages, it could have been like four people, but it literally brought the country to a standstill,” he says. “A lot of times these rifts are there already, and so in a certain sense I guess Facebook is a mirror, holding itself up to the differences in society. But social media can also become a real catalyst for the violence.”

Christina Larson says there’s a debate to be had about what hate speech means in a particular context and how to define it, “but what I would consider dangerous speech is advocating that the Rohingya need to leave Myanmar, and sharing doctored images of them supposedly burning their own houses to create a media spectacle.”

In a way, she says, these images—which were liked and shared tens of thousands of times—”gave cover for military action and human rights violations, including violence and rape. You can’t say social media kills people any more than you can say guns kill people, but certainly social media shaped public opinion in a way that seems to have played a part in the escalation of violence against the Rohingya population.”

Facebook’s approach to countries like Myanmar and others in the region often strikes those on the ground as not just out of touch but actively cavalier. In its recent split-feed tests, for example, users in countries like Cambodia and Slovakia had news articles moved to a completely separate feed, which local non-profit groups and media outlets say significantly impacted their ability to reach people with crucial information.

It’s one thing to tread carefully around issues like free speech, Larson says, “but if you’re going to run A/B testing, where you change an algorithm and see what you think consumers like best, for God’s sake, stick to stable democracies. Don’t pick a place where there’s an authoritarian regime that is busy locking up opposition leaders, and Facebook is a primary way that activists communicate about their government.”

In many ways, Myanmar is an example of the future Mark Zuckerberg seems to want: A country in which most people are connected through the social network and get virtually all of their news from it. And yet, the outcome of that isn’t a utopian vision of a better world, it’s exactly the opposite—a world where ethnic and cultural tensions are inflamed and weaponized. And Facebook’s response looks almost completely inadequate to the dangers it has helped unleash.

 

————————————————————————-

“Facebook has become a bit like an absentee landlord in Southeast Asia,” says Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia division. “When Buddhist extremists start instigating action against Muslims [in Myanmar], looking around for the local Facebook representative is hopeless — there isn’t one. Instead, it’s sort of, complain into the void and hope some relief arrives before it’s too late

Why is Facebook so useful to the junta? First, its insistence on a “real name-only” policy makes for easy tracking of dissidents. Even in cases where people successfully mask their names, their web of social connections makes them potentially easy to identify. (In the U.S., sex workers have already found themselves inadvertently exposedby Facebook’s data-aggregation and friend suggestions.) Hard-to-navigate privacy settings can mean that what people mistakenly think of as private speech, limited to a small group of friends, is often anything but. “If you make a certain kind of comment online, you can quickly be sent to prison in Thailand,” says iLaw researcher Anon Chawalawan.

But the BBC has reported that one unintended impact was dramatically shrinking the number of people who would see published items. “Out of all the countries in the world, why Cambodia? This couldn’t have come at a worse time,” a Cambodian blogger told the BBC, explaining that the number of people who saw her public video had dropped by more than 80 percent. “Suddenly I realized, wow, they actually hold so much power.… [Facebook] can crush us just like that if they want to.”

Facebook Can’t Cope With the World It’s Created

 

The crackdown has already claimed two NGOs, more than a dozen radio stations, and the local offices of two independent media outlets, Radio Free Asia and The Cambodia Daily. Hun Sen’s main opposition, the Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP), could be dissolved entirely at a Supreme Court hearing on 16 November.

“Out of all the countries in the world, why Cambodia?” Ms Harry asks of Facebook’s experiment. “This couldn’t have come at a worse time.”

Facebook surpassed TV as Cambodians’ most popular source of news last year, according to a survey from the Asia Foundation, with roughly half of respondents saying they used the social media network.

The platform helped power the CNRP’s gains against the governing Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) in the 2013 national elections and has been one of the only places for dissent in a country ranked 132nd out of 180 countries in Reporters Without Borders’ 2017 World Press Freedom Index.

Hun Sen’s longtime rival, Sam Rainsy, the exiled former president of the CNRP who runs a popular page of his own, said his traffic had dipped 20% since the start of the Facebook test. Unlike the prime minister, whom he accused of buying Facebook supporters from foreign “click farms”, Mr Rainsy said he could not pay to sponsor his posts to put them in front of more users in their usual News Feeds.

“Facebook’s latest initiative would possibly give an even stronger competitive edge to authoritarian and corrupt politicians,” he said.

Leang Phannara, web editor for Post Khmer, the Khmer-language version of independent English daily the Phnom Penh Post, said Khmer Facebook posts were reaching 45% fewer people, while web traffic was down 35%. The only way to recapture that audience was to pay to sponsor posts, he said.

“It’s a pay-to-play scenario,” Mr Phannara said.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-41801071

 

“Phil Robertson, deputy director of Asia Division of Human Rights Watch, said the Rohingya were forced to get the word out about their cause on Facebook and Twitter because the few media outlets in Myanmar that exercise independence in reporting on the situation in Rakhine face threats of boycotts and retaliation.
Not many media outlets in the country, he said, were willing to take the risk of alienating their readers, advertisers, and in some cases, their staff, by calling out the Burmese government for the campaign of ethnic cleansing they are involved in.

“Of course, the problem with social media is that their policing mechanisms can be used for harassment by those willing to mount a concerted campaign of filing complaints against specific Facebook pages or Twitter feeds,” Robertson added. “We’ve seen an explosion of Rakhine and Burman nationalists using Twitter, retweeting hateful messages and gory images, so it would not surprise me at all if some of those nationalists, using bot accounts and pages apparently set up en masse, are now going on the attack against Rohingya on Facebook.”

(Many Rohingya refugees and activists said their pages had been blocked or banned from Facebook because they were posting photos and videos of anti-Rohingya violence. Facebook said it was leaving some such posts up for news purposes but was removing those it said were promoting or celebrating violence).

“I believe [Facebook] is trying to suppress freedom [of] expression and dissent by colluding with the genocidaires in Myanmar regime,” the activist and journalist Mohammad Anwar told the Guardian. Anwar, whose allegations of censorship were first reported by the Daily Beast, shared screenshots of numerous posts that had been removed by Facebook for violating community standards. Several of the posts comprised only text, he said, and described military operations against Rohingya villages in Rakhine.

The Kuala Lumpur-based journalist, who works for the site RohingyaBlogger.com, said that his reports come from a network of 45 correspondents and citizen journalists in Rakhine.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/20/facebook-rohingya-muslims-myanmar

 

Laura Haigh, Amnesty International’s Burma researcher, told The Daily Beast there appears to be a targeted campaign in Burma to report Rohingya accounts to Facebook and get them shut down.

Mohammad Anwar, a Kuala Lumpur-based Rohingya activist and journalist with the site RohingyaBlogger.com, told The Daily Beast that Facebook has repeatedly deleted his posts about violence in Rakhine State, and has threatened to disable his account.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/exclusive-rohingya-activists-say-facebook-silences-them

 

“In a lot of these countries, Facebook is the de facto public square,” said Cynthia Wong, a senior internet researcher for Human Rights Watch. “Because of that, it raises really strong questions about Facebook needing to take on more responsibility for the harms their platform has contributed to.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/29/business/facebook-misinformation-abroad.html

 

Fake news demonizing Muslims, particularly reports spreading fears of terrorism or Islamic fundamentalism, has sometimes led to disastrous consequences. Those reports have spread like wildfire on Facebook, where Buddhist nationalist groups like Ma Ba Tha have gained prominence by building legions of followers.

That’s what happened in the region of Bago, north of Yangon, on June 23, when a Buddhist mob reportedly destroyed homes and forced dozens of villagers to flee after rumors spread online that a new building in the village was going to be a Muslim school.

MIDO, which regularly monitors Burmese hate speech on Facebook as part of a research project with Oxford University, found that only 10% of the postings it reported according to its own definition of hate speech were eventually taken down by Facebook. The reporting mechanism is clunky, and the process is opaque, said MIDO’s Htaike Htaike Aung.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/meghara/how-fake-news-and-online-hate-are-making-life-hell-for?utm_term=.rtwBAO7JM#.hjg18qx63

 

Much of India’s false news is spread through WhatsApp, a popular messaging app. One message that made the rounds in November, just after the government announced an overhaul of the country’s cash, claimed that a newly released 2,000 rupee bank note would contain a GPS tracking nano-chip that could locate bank notes hidden as far as 390 feet underground. Another rumor, about salt shortageslast November, prompted a rush on salt in four Indian states. In southern India, a rumor about a measles and rubella vaccine thwarted a government immunization drive.

Many false stories have led to violence. In May, rumors about child abductors in a village triggered several lynchings and the deaths of seven people. In August, rumors about an occult gang chopping off women’s braids in northern India spread panic, and a low-caste woman was killed.

Some stories exacerbate India’s rising religious and caste tensions. This week, for instance, images purportedly showing attacks against Hindus by “Rohingya Islamic terrorists” in Burma circulated on social media in India, stoking hatred in Hindu-majority India against Muslim Rohingya.

“There was one video with two people being beheaded, and the text was saying these were Indian soldiers being killed in Pakistan. When I found the original video, it was actually taken from footage of a gang war in Brazil,” said Pankaj Jain, founder of SMHoaxSlayer.com, a website that fact-checks circulating rumors on social media in India. “They’ll tell you this is fresh, these are images the media is not showing you, if you’re a true Indian patriot, you will forward this message.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/indias-millions-of-new-internet-users-are-falling-for-fake-news%E2%80%94sometimes-with-deadly-consequences/2017/10/01/f078eaee-9f7f-11e7-8ed4-a750b67c552b_story.html?utm_term=.d2317b71eac3

 

New York Times technology reporter Paul Mozur says in Myanmar, Facebook is everywhere.

“The entire internet is Facebook and Facebook is the internet. Most people don’t necessarily know how to operate or get on and navigate regular websites. They live, eat, sleep and breathe Facebook.” Facebook users in Myanmar grew from about 2 million in 2014 to more than 30 million today.

Which is why the misinformation spread on Facebook can be so dangerous.

Mozur says Facebook has become a breeding ground for pernicious posts about the Rohingya. “In particular, the ones that seem most problematic are government channels that have put a lot of propaganda out there, saying everything from the Rohingya are burning their own villages, to showing bodies of soldiers who may be from other conflicts but saying this is the result of a Rohingya attack, to more nuanced stuff like calling the Rohingya ‘Bengalis’ and saying they don’t belong in the country.”

These posts are widely shared and generate thousands of likes.

https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-11-01/myanmar-fake-news-spread-facebook-stokes-ethnic-violence

 

Social media messaging has driven much of the rage in Myanmar. Though widespread access to cellphones only started a few years ago, mobile penetration is now about 90 percent. For many people, Facebook is their only source of news, and they have little experience in sifting fake news from credible reporting.

One widely shared message on Facebook, from a spokesman for Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s office, emphasized that biscuits from the World Food Program, a United Nations agency, had been found at a Rohingya militant training camp. The United Nations called the post “irresponsible.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/24/world/asia/myanmar-rohingya-ethnic-cleansing.html?_r=0

 

(Craig Mod) Almost all of the farmers we spoke with were Facebook users. None had heard of Twitter. How they used Facebook was not dissimilar to how many of us in the West see and think of Twitter: as a source of news, a place where you can follow your interests. The majority, however, didn’t see the social platform as a place to be particularly social or to connect with and stay up to date on comings and goings within their villages.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/the-facebook-loving-farmers-of-myanmar/424812/

 

Stevan Dojcinovic, who runs an independent non-profit investigative news agency in Serbia, wrote a piece for the NYT saying “Hey Mark Zuckerberg, My Democracy Isn’t Your Laboratory” — he says: “for us, changes like this can be disastrous. Attracting viewers to a story relies, above all, on making the process as simple as possible. Even one extra click can make a world of difference. This is an existential threat, not only to my organization and others like it but also to the ability of citizens in all of the countries subject to Facebook’s experimentation to discover the truth about their societies and their leaders.”

That’s why Mark Zuckerberg’s arbitrary experiments are so dangerous. The major TV channels, mainstream newspapers and organized-crime-run outlets will have no trouble buying Facebook ads or finding other ways to reach their audiences. It’s small, alternative organizations like mine that will suffer. A private company, accountable to no one, has taken over the world’s media ecosystem. It is now responsible for what happens there. By picking small countries with shaky democratic institutions to be experimental subjects, it is showing a cynical lack of concern for how its decisions affect the most vulnerable.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/15/opinion/serbia-facebook-explore-feed.html

 

Free speech on the Internet is a controversial topic these days, thanks to Russian-backed troll armies distributing misinformation on Twitter and Facebook, Nazi sympathisers preaching hate, and the daily harassment that women and people of colour get subjected to on many social platforms.

For all of its flaws, however, the freedom that the web allows is a critical part of what makes it such a powerful tool, not just for tweeting or sharing baby photos but for journalism of all kinds, including “citizen journalism,” crowdsourcing, eyewitness reporting and collaborative journalism. The web gives anyone the ability to publish, in some cases anonymously, and while that can facilitate hateful behavior, it can also reveal important secrets.

Free-speech advocates — including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology — are afraid that a bill currently making its way through Congress could significantly weaken those freedoms, and that the repercussions for online speech could be severe.

In the United States, one of the most critical planks supporting free expression online is a section of the 1996 Communications Decency Act known as Section 230, often referred to as the “safe harbor” clause, which the EFF describes as “the most important law protecting Internet speech.”

Section 230 states that “no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” In a nutshell, this clause gives any online service provider immunity from legal liability for the content that its members or users post (unless it involves either criminal activity or intellectual property).

This means that platforms like Facebook and Twitter and Amazon can’t be sued if one of their users publishes something that is libellous or offensive. But it also protects much smaller companies and platforms and online communities from similar kinds of liability, and it protects digital news companies and online publishers from being taken to court for the comments that readers post on articles.

The bill that the EFF and others are so concerned about is called the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act or SESTA, which would amend Section 230. The bill was approved by the Senate commerce committee this week.

According to its main sponsor, Republican Senator Bob Portman from Ohio, the legislation is supposed to make it easier to crack down on sex trafficking, which is facilitated in some cases through online services like Backpage, a provider of adult classified-ad listings that is currently facing a potential grand jury indictment.

Most people would agree that bringing an end to sex trafficking is a noble goal — although there are those who disagree about whether SESTA will be able to do so (some experts believe it could actually expose sex trafficking victims to more harm, and make it more difficult to stop the practice). But in the process of reaching that goal, the proposed law could blast a large hole right through the free-speech protections of Section 230.

“An Internet without Section 230 is one that diminishes the voice of the individual online, limits our access to information and diverse platforms for our speech, and pressures all intermediaries to act as gatekeepers and judge user content,” says Nuala O’Connor, president and CEO of the Center for Democracy and Technology.

While it is celebrated by free-speech advocates, however, not everyone is a fan of Section 230. Some observers say there is a growing belief in Washington that the law gives Internet companies too much freedom, and that its protections should be loosened so the government can hold Facebook and Google accountable for things like fake news and hate speech.

There appears to be “increasing skepticism about Section 230 inside the Beltway, and in fact increasing skepticism about Silicon Valley,” says Eric Goldman, an expert in Internet law at Santa Clara University. “There’s a widespread fear that Internet companies are causing society’s ills rather than just holding a mirror up to them.”

SESTA’s critics warn that the proposed law could lead to a significant smothering of online speech of all kinds, not just speech about sex trafficking. That’s because the bill creates a new kind of liability by making it a crime to “knowingly facilitate, assist or support” any such activity.

Daphne Keller of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society says that the new law could push some platforms and  publishers to crack down on a wide variety of speech, to avoid the threat of lawsuits. It would give them “a reason to err on the side of removing Internet users’ speech in response to any controversy,” she says, “and in response to false or mistaken allegations, which are often levied against online speech.”

Cindy Cohn, executive director of the EFF, said in an interview that she fears the bill will put pressure on small websites and online communities in particular, and some might decide to shut down for fear of lawsuits, while others might never get into the market at all. And the web in general would ultimately be the poorer for it.

“I worry about this a lot, because we’re already in a place where only a few places are hosting people’s speech, and now there’s a lot more pressure on them to limit what people can say on these platforms,” says Cohn. “It will shrink the number of voices because it will shrink the number of places that are willing to host those voices. Ultimately it won’t be worth it to host a bulletin board or comments, and that will just entrench the big guys.”

Goldman says that even after an amendment this week that tried to tighten up the definition of what constitutes “knowledge of conduct,” the language in the bill is still far too broad, and could wind up catching all kinds of other activity in its net.

Not only that, but he says SESTA could potentially create a kind of boomerang effect, by creating a perverse incentive for some sites to ignore all sexually related posts or behavior — since doing anything about them would suggest knowledge, and therefore liability if they miss something.

“If a site decides the best strategy is to dial back its efforts to moderate content” so that they can claim not to have knowledge, he says, “the bill could have the counterproductive result of exacerbating other types of antisocial behavior, because some companies won’t bother to moderate at all.”

Senator Ron Wyden, who co-wrote the original Section 230 clause into the Communications Decency Act, has said he opposes SESTA because of the damage it could do to online speech, and to startups who rely on Section 230’s protections to remain in business, or to even make their business viable at all.  “The bill that we’re looking at today is the wrong answer to a serious problem,” he told the Senate commerce committee in September.

This week, Wyden put a hold on the bill, in the hope that some senators might reconsider their support. But the pressure to do something about sex trafficking is intensifying, and with industry groups like the Internet Association behind it and widespread support in Congress, observers say SESTA stands a good chance of becoming law.

And if it does, it could significantly curtail speech online, in ways that will affect not just large social platforms like Facebook and Twitter but media sites and online publishers of all kinds.

By now, most of us are probably familiar with the idea that large numbers of fake and automated Twitter and Facebook accounts, many of them run by trolls linked to the Russian government, created and amplified misinformation in an attempt to interfere with the 2016 election. But this wasn’t just a one-off incident—trolls of all kinds continue to use bots to try and influence public opinion in all kinds of ways.

To take one of the most recent examples, there is some evidence that automated Twitter accounts have been distributing and promoting controversial race-related content during the gubernatorial race in Virginia, which is currently underway. According to a study by Discourse Intelligence, whose work was financed by the National Education Association, more than a dozen either partially or fully automated bots were involved.

The activity relates to a video advertisement produced by the Latino Victory Fund, which shows a child having a nightmare in which a supporter of Republican candidate Ed Gillespie chases immigrant children in a pickup truck that is decorated with a Confederate flag. The study said the accounts had the potential to reach over 650,000 people.

One of the biggest problems with this kind of misinformation, from a media point of view, is that because of the way the media industry functions now—and particularly the focus on traffic-generating clickbait and other revenue-based behavior—if the message being promoted by fake and automated becomes loud or persistent enough, it is often picked up by traditional media outlets, which can exacerbate the problem by giving it legitimacy.

In one prominent case, a fake and largely automated Twitter account belonging to someone who pretended to be Jenna Abrams, a Trump-loving young woman, was widely quoted not just on right-wing news sites such as Breitbart or on conservative-leaning networks like Fox News, but in plenty of other places as well, such as USA Today and even the Washington Post. The account was created by a Russian “troll factory.”

In each of these kinds of cases, the life-cycle or trajectory of such bits of misinformation reinforces just how fragmented and chaotic the media landscape has become: Misinformation from notorious troll playgrounds like 4chan or Reddit makes its way to Twitter and/or Facebook, gets promoted there by both automated accounts and unwitting accomplices, and then gets highlighted on news channels and websites.

Mainstream media outlets like Fox News, for example, helped promote the idea that “anti-fa” or anti-fascist groups were planning a weekend uprising in an attempt to overthrow the US government, an idea that got traction initially on Reddit and 4chan and appears to have been created by alt-right and fake news sites such as InfoWars.

After the Texas church shooting on the weekend, tweets from alt-right personality Mike Cernovich—who was also instrumental in promoting the so-called “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory that went viral during the 2016 election—were highlighted in Google search (in the search engine’s Twitter result “carousel” that appears at the top of search results). The tweets contained misinformation about the alleged shooter’s background, including reports he was a member of an “anti-fa” group and that he had recently converted to Islam.

Google has come under fire—and deservedly so—for a number of such cases, including one in which a misleading report from 4chan appeared at the top of search results for information on the mass shooting in Las Vegas. The company apologized, and senior executives have said privately that they are trying hard to avoid a repeat of such behavior, but the misinformation showing up about the Texas shooting tweet shows there is still much work to be done.

The search giant got off relatively easily at the recent hearings before both the Senate and the House intelligence committees, with most of the criticism and attention focused on the behavior of social networks like Twitter and Facebook. And while Google might argue that it’s Twitter’s fault if misinformation is promoted by trolls during election, if those results show up high up in search, then that also means it’s Google’s problem.

The giant tech platforms all say that they are doing their best to make headway against misinformation and the fake and automated accounts that spread it, but critics of the companies note that until recently they denied that much of this activity was even occurring at all. Facebook, for example, initially denied that Russian-backed accounts were involved in targeting fake news and divisive ads at US voters.

At the Congressional hearings, representatives for Google, Facebook and Twitter all maintained that fake and automated activity is a relatively small part of what appears on their networks, but some senators were skeptical.

Twitter, for example, reiterated to Congress the same statistic it has used for years, which is that bots and fake accounts represent less than 5% of the total number of users, or about 15 million accounts. But researchers have calculated that as much as 15% of the company’s user base is made up of fake and automated accounts, which would put the total closer to 50 million. And a significant part of their activity appears to be orchestrated.

Whether any of this activity is actually influencing voters in one direction or another is harder to say. Some Russian-influenced activity during the 2016 election appeared to be designed to push voters towards one candidate or another, but much of it—as described in Facebook’s internal security report, released in April—seemed to be designed to just cause general chaos and uncertainty, or to inflame political divisions on issues like race.

As with most things involving this kind of behavior, it’s also difficult (if not impossible) to say exactly how much of this was organized by malicious agents intent on disrupting the election in favor of one candidate or another, and how much of it was simply random bad actors trying to cause trouble.

The Internet Research Agency, a Kremlin-linked entity that employed a “troll army” to promote misleading stories during the election, is the most well-known of the organized actors employing these methods. But there are undoubtedly more, both within and outside Russia, and all three of the tech giants admitted at the Congressional hearings that they have only scratched the surface when it comes to finding or cracking down on this kind of behavior.

 

The major tech companies did what they probably hoped was the requisite amount of bowing and scraping before the assembled members of both the House and the Senate intelligence committees on Wednesday, after being called on the carpet for their role in distributing Russian-backed ads and fake news during the 2016 election. But tangible commitments from the tech giants were few and far between.

Once the political rhetoric was swept away, representatives from Facebook, Google, and Twitter admitted they make money (in some cases quite a lot of it, as Facebook reported a record profit of $4.7 billion for the latest quarter) from their advertising businesses. And because of the structure of their platforms, all admitted that some of that money inevitably comes from fake accounts, including—as it turns out—agents of the Russian government.

Google, in fact, said that while Twitter has banned the Russian government-backed media outlet RT from its platform, the search giant had no plans to stop RT from advertising on YouTube, which has reportedly become a significant part of the Russian outlet’s media campaign. Why? Because its behavior hasn’t breached Google’s rules, the company said.

In a nutshell, the trio were adamant (in a deferential way, of course) that while they look and behave very much like media companies, they will resist attempts to force them to abide by the same kinds of rules. Each committed to taking steps to add disclosure to their ads, in the hope that doing so might blunt the need for legislation, which the Senate is currently working on.

The three repeated many of the same tropes in their testimony that they trotted out in the Senate judiciary committee meeting on Tuesday. Namely, that malicious behavior by fake accounts created by Russian troll farms was relatively minor in scope compared to the size of their vast platforms, that they recognize how disturbing these incidents were—and they feel terrible about it—and that they are working hard to prevent it from happening again.

In all three cases, the companies appear to be trying desperately to have their cake and eat it too: Arguing that the number of fake accounts or dubious ads or malicious actors represents only a tiny fraction of the activity on their platforms (0.004 percent, according to Facebook) while telling advertisers and corporate users how effective their advertising and reach is.

As more than one senator pointed out during the interview portion of the hearings, one of the best advertisements for the effectiveness of the platforms is the amount of influence that Russia’s troll farms were able to purchase for so little money. And advertisers are clearly getting that message loud and clear.

Facebook, for example, admitted at the hearings that almost 150 million users were exposed to the fake ads and accounts that were created by the Kremlin-backed entity known as the Internet Research Agency, after initially saying just a few million were exposed (and even earlier claiming there was no evidence of Russian involvement at all). And what did all of that exposure cost the Russian outfit? About $100,000.

In some cases, campaigns that cost just $1,200—several of which were displayed by senators during the hearings and released to the public afterwards, including pages with names like South United and Blacktivists—got the fake accounts huge numbers of followers and engagement.

https://twitter.com/dnvolz/status/925796721002799105

While Facebook in particular tried hard to keep the conversation focused on the advertising issue, several members of the senate committee pointed out that a far larger problem is the reach and influence of so-called “organic” posts—which don’t cost anyone anything, and as a result are far more difficult to track (according to Facebook’s general counsel).

This is a crucial point. Unlike traditional media outlets, where advertising and editorial are kept relatively separate, one of the core features of a social network like Facebook is that virtually any piece of content on the platform can become an ad. That feature has helped the company pull tens of billions of dollars of advertising away from traditional media entities, to the point where it and Google now control a majority of the digital ad business.

And what exactly are the platforms doing to try and prevent similar problems in the future? This was a question repeated over and over throughout the proceedings, but the answer isn’t at all clear, and in fact it got murkier and murkier as the hearings continued.

All three of the companies said they are working on improving their automated systems so they could detect potential fake or malicious accounts better and faster—Twitter claimed it has gotten twice as good as it used to be, and now challenges 4 million potentially fake accounts every week. Facebook talked about partnering with other companies on a cyber-threat team, and said it is doubling the number of people it has working on security to 20,000.

When pressed, however, all three admitted that they probably haven’t discovered all of the malicious activity on their platforms, and that there is likely to be much more to come—including more Russian-linked activity. And what, if anything, should Congress be doing about that? Shrugs all around (but deferential shrugs, of course).

Each of the platforms also demurred when pressed on some of the steps that senators and members of the House committee thought might be worthwhile, such as notifying users who had been the target of fake ads and accounts. Too difficult, Facebook said.

The tech platforms each have their own reasons for trying to ju jitsu their way out of the government’s clutches. In Twitter’s case, it is desperately trying to hang onto its status as an anonymous network that stresses free speech, something that came under fire repeatedly during the hearings. But a lack of action could inflame the desire of some legislators to regulate the tech giants, since many believe they are already too powerful.

And what form might that legislation take? That remains to be seen, but proposals from critics have so far run the gamut from requiring better advertising disclosure to subjecting some or all of the tech giants to the full weight of US antitrust legislation, or fine-tuning the “safe harbor” that internet giants currently enjoy when it comes to offensive content.

As Senator Dianne Feinstein put it during the hearings: “You created these platforms, and now they’re being misused. And you have to be the ones who do something about it—or we will.” And that is likely to strike fear into the hearts of even the most powerful tech giant.

While most of the attention has focused on Facebook when it comes to running Russia-linked ads designed to influence the 2016 election, Google and Twitter are also under the microscope for doing something similar, which reinforces the point that this isn’t a problem related specifically to Facebook, but one connected to something much broader about how Internet platforms behave, and the way advertising and media work now.

All three companies have been asked to testify before both the Senate and the House intelligence committees, which are investigating how much influence Russian agents connected to the government had over the information flowing through those networks about the 2016 campaign. Reports from both the FBI and the CIA have said that this likely had an impact on the election, although the magnitude of that impact is difficult to quantify.

In early September, when Facebook was starting to draw attention for links to Russian election-meddling, Google went on the record as saying it hadn’t found any sign of similar untoward advertising campaigns on its platforms. “We’re always monitoring for abuse or violations of our policies and we’ve seen no evidence this type of ad campaign was run on our platforms,” the company said in a statement to Reuters.

A little over a month later, the company was telling a different story. Although it hasn’t confirmed the reports publicly, sources told the Washington Post, the New York Times and Reuters that Google had come across signs of advertising buys that appeared to be part of a Russia-backed misinformation campaign involving the election — although the ads don’t appear to be from the Internet Research Agency, the “troll factory” behind the Facebook campaign.

The campaign on Google represented less than $100,000 worth of advertising. A total of about $5,000 worth of search ads and display ads were bought by accounts believed to be connected to the Russian government, according to the New York Times, while a further $53,000 or so were bought by accounts with Russian Internet addresses or with Russian currency. It’s not clear whether these were related to Russian government entities.

Google doesn’t offer advertisers the same kind of granular targeting that Facebook does, in which individuals can be selected to receive a specific message based on their political views and other information. The company also has a policy that prevents targeting of ads based on race and religion. Ironically, Google found the Russian-linked ad buying by using data from Twitter, a source told the Washington Post.

As with Facebook, the fact that Russian government entities and other agents were able to buy and distribute ads and other information on Google and Twitter is not a bug or a flaw in the system but an example of it working exactly as intended. All three companies have built more or less automated advertising networks that allow companies and individuals to buy ads with virtually zero human input.

Twitter has been a bit more forthcoming with information than Google, but its efforts haven’t been universally well-received. The company told members of the Senate intelligence committee in a closed-door hearing in September that it had found and shut down about 200 accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency, and it said that the Russian news site RT — which many believe is tied to the government — spent about $275,000 on Twitter ads in 2016.

One of the top-ranking Democrats on the Senate intelligence committee wasn’t impressed by Twitter’s efforts, however. Mark Warner said that the company’s presentation was “inadequate” and “deeply disappointing,” primarily because Twitter only searched its databases for information related to the accounts that Facebook had already identified.

“The notion that their work was basically derivative, based upon accounts that Facebook had identified, showed an enormous lack of understanding from the Twitter team of how serious this issue is, the threat it poses to democratic institutions, and again, begs many more questions than they [answer],” Warner said after the presentation.

Not only that, but some of the data that Twitter relied on has since been deleted as a result of the company’s privacy policies around retention of information, according to security analysts. That could complicate the Senate and House investigations into how these platforms were used by Russian agents to try and influence the election.

According to research from the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a public-policy group in Washington, more than 600 Twitter accounts — run by both human users and suspected bots or automated accounts — have been linked to what appear to be Russian attempts to influence voter behavior around the election.  Other research has also shown signs of a “bot army” that was mobilized by foreign agents during the election.

Thomas Rid, a Strategic Studies professor at Johns Hopkins University and an expert in Russian disinformation tactics, told Politico: “Were Twitter a contractor for FSB [the Russian intelligence agency], they could not have built a more effective disinformation platform.” Clint Watts, a former FBI agent, said Twitter is problematic because “the truth is they don’t know who is on their platform, or how bad people are doing bad things.”

In a blog post in June, a senior Twitter executive said that the company believes that the network’s “open and real-time nature is a powerful antidote to the spreading of all types of false information.” This is important, he said, because “we cannot distinguish whether every single Tweet from every person is truthful or not. We, as a company, should not be the arbiter of truth.” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made similar comments when pressed about the company’s responsibility for stopping “fake news” and other forms of misinformation.

 

The relationship between media outlets and social platforms like Twitter has always been a tense one. On some level, publishers know they have to be there, because that’s where the news happens, and it’s also where their content gets shared—but at the same time, they are afraid of what might happen if reporters and editors speak their minds.

The New York Times waded back into this particular swamp when it introduced an update to its social-media guidelines, and reinforced the fact that its staff are not to express any “partisan opinion” on any social platform. The Times also noted that while reporters might be using these accounts on their personal time, anything said on them is the purview of the paper because of their association with it.

Not to be outdone, the Wall Street Journal also released an update to its social-media policy this week. It reiterated the existing prohibition against “posting partisan comments on social networking sites,” and added that the paper’s management believes that some reporters and editors “are spending too much time tweeting.”

The impetus for these statements is hardly a mystery. The Times has come under fire (from the president and others) for being anti-Trump, and the paper’s editors are no doubt hoping to mitigate some of that by preventing reporters from tweeting anti-Trump diatribes. The Journal, meanwhile, has been criticized for being pro-Trump.

In other words, these new policies amount to an attempt at damage control. The Times guidelines say tweets that editorialize on the news “undercut the credibility of the entire newsroom,” and the Journal‘s statement says such behavior “erodes the hard-won trust of our readers.” Everyone must be scrupulously objective, or at least appear that way.

NYT's new social media rules, like many of its policies, start from the idea that it's important to hide reporters' true views from readers.

— Nick Baumann (@NickBaumann) October 13, 2017

There are a couple of obvious problems with this. One is that only a vanishingly small number of people likely believe that reporters at the Times and Journal are objective anyway—or that they are even trying to be. Most probably feel that each outlet is biased in a variety of ways, and they probably didn’t get that idea from a reporter’s tweets.

And what qualifies as partisan—a belief that the president shouldn’t repeatedly lie? A belief that black lives matter? These policies are likely to further smother voices that need to be heard, like those of women and people of color, who are already poorly represented in media.

A debate over whether true objectivity is even possible, let alone desirable, would require a much longer discussion. But suffice it to say that this particular train has probably already left the station, much as newspaper editors might like it to return.

The bottom line is that those who believe that the Times is out to get Trump, or that the Journal is out to prop him up, are unlikely to change their minds simply because reporters and editors revert to robotic tweets that contain nothing but the facts, and a link that their editors are desperately hoping someone will click on so they can make their monthly numbers.

Be circumspect. Cover your tracks. Don't show you're biased. Be biased in private! https://t.co/DfHFQwByvX

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) October 13, 2017

So the first downside of these kinds of policies is that they won’t achieve what publishers want them to achieve. The second, and possibly even more important, point is that they will also prevent media outlets from using social media to its full potential, and that could cause far more long-term harm than a rowdy tweet about Trump’s IQ or Cheeto-colored visage.

To the extent that social media works—in the sense that it allows media outlets and journalists to connect with their readers and/or viewers, and allows those readers to both promote and provide feedback on their journalism—it works because it is social. And being social means being human, and being human means expressing opinions, and in some cases being wrong.

If someone tells you that they have no opinion, even on serious issues, that they are totally objective and that they also never make a mistake, you would probably think they are either a liar or a sociopath. And yet that is what social-media policies like the ones at the Times and the Journal are essentially asking people to believe.

This flawed approach is even more dangerous for publishers who, like the Times and the Journal, are relying increasingly on subscriptions, membership fees and other relationship-based models for their continued economic survival.

How do you convince people to support you in such a way? By building a relationship with them, one that encourages them to believe you share a worldview, or at least that you can be trusted. And how do you do that? Not by pretending you have no opinions, but by being as honest as possible—asking for feedback and admitting when you make a mistake. In other words, by being human.

Is this messy? Yes. Could it blow up in your face? Definitely. But retreating into your shell and trying to pretend that your reporters are not human beings actually encourages your readers to trust you less, not more. And that could be fatal.

I’m excited to to announce that I’m joining the Columbia Journalism Review as chief digital writer, focusing primarily on the power of platforms like Facebook and Google (and Twitter and Snapchat) and what that means for media.

Digital and social networks have become the central distribution system for news for hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people. And that power — much of which is hidden from view, fuelled by mysterious algorithms — has profound implications for both media and society as a whole.

I’ve been a fan of the CJR ever since I was a young journalism student in Toronto — which was longer ago than I care to remember — and I’ve been impressed with what Kyle Pope has done in his time as editor of the magazine and the site, including a renewed focus on the web and the impact of digital media.

I’m also a huge fan of what my friend Emily Bell is doing with the Tow Center at Columbia, and I hope that we can find ways to work together to explore and understand what is happening to journalism and media. Or at least maybe get a cup of tea and commiserate 🙂

All joking aside, this is a dark time for journalism in many ways — but it is also a fascinating time, as the ground continues to shift beneath us, and even some of the bedrock assumptions underlying the industry are being questioned.

Journalism has arguably never been more important than it is right now, but the media landscape has also never been more fractured, more volatile and more under pressure — both financially and otherwise — than it is now, and much of the pressure is coming from Facebook and Google.

I hope to explore the impact of those forces in a variety of ways at CJR, and I hope that you will come with me on that journey and help me to explore and understand it.

You can tell how much a specific issue has gotten under Mark Zuckerberg’s skin by the amount of effort he puts into his response. Some things get just a small mention, some get a press release, some get a 6,000-word blog post — and some get the Facebook equivalent of a full-court press. Zuckerberg’s video address on Thursday afternoon, in which he tried to address concerns about Russian election interference via Facebook ads, definitely falls into the latter category.

The Facebook CEO is clearly trying to get out in front of this issue, in a way he hasn’t with anything other than maybe the fake news brouhaha, and for the same reason: Because he’s afraid of what Congress might do if he doesn’t pre-empt their actions with his own remedies.

To that end, his video address offered what Zuckerberg described as transparency around the so-called “dark ads” that political operatives (including those working for Donald Trump during his campaign, using tools like Cambridge Analytica) love to use in an attempt to target specific groups and individuals on the platform.

In a nutshell, advertisers will have to disclose all of their ads on their Facebook pages so anyone can see them, and Facebook is turning over details of Russian involvement to the intelligence committees looking into that country’s attempts to influence the election.

“I care deeply about the democratic process and protecting its integrity [and] I don’t want anyone to use our tools to undermine democracy. That’s not what we stand for,” said Zuckerberg, who also posted the text of his remarks to Facebook. “It is a new challenge for internet communities to deal with nation states attempting to subvert elections. But if that’s what we must do, we are committed to rising to the occasion.”

The moves announced by Zuckerberg seem like admirable steps aimed at bringing shadowy political advertising into the light, and an offering that many Facebook critics have been calling for. Some congratulated Zuckerberg for finally listening to their demands for more clarity and transparency.

Credit where it is due: this is exactly what myself and others have called for. This is a great step. https://t.co/EvupFswCTR

— Daniel Kreiss (@kreissdaniel) September 21, 2017

There’s a catch to Facebook’s offering though, and it’s contained in the term “political ads.” How exactly does Zuckerberg plan to define that term? Some ads might be obvious because they include political topics or personalities. But one of the key aspects of Facebook’s business is that almost anything can function as an ad, including news stories (fake or otherwise). And Russian operatives likely made use of all of these tools and more.

We talk of ‘news’ ‘fake news’ and ‘advertising’ as distinct types of content . But the FB infrastructure can render them indistinguishable

— emily bell (@emilybell) September 21, 2017

In fact, in a recent report, Facebook’s own security team spelled out some of the many ways in which it suspects government actors of various kinds manipulated the platform to try and influence the outcome of the US election.

“We identified malicious actors on Facebook who, via inauthentic accounts, actively engaged across the political spectrum, with the apparent intent of increasing tensions between supporters of these groups and fracturing their supportive base.”

Zuckerberg may be hoping that his newfound interest in transparency will assuage those who are looking to regulate Facebook’s behavior, but if so his hope is likely to be in vain.

Matt Stoller is an influential political analyst who works for a group called Open Markets Institute (the group was formerly part of the New America Foundation, but left after what its founder alleges was pressure from Google). Stoller clearly believes that Facebook should be subject to government regulatory oversight on a number of fronts — including areas related to political advertising.

This shouldn't be Facebook's decision. It should be America's decision. https://t.co/MSwxXQPev7

— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) September 21, 2017

Stoller isn’t alone. Brianna Wu, who gained a high profile online after being targeted for harassment during the “Gamergate” uproar, is running for Congress in Massachusetts, and says she is in favor of regulation for Facebook as well. “Facebook has far too much power to not be regulated the way traditional media is. It’s anticompetitive to give them a legal out,” she said on Twitter. And sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, who has been asking for more transparency from Facebook for some time, said: “I’d been calling for this for many years—but key point here is that Facebook, actually one person, can arbitrarily decide to do this or not.”

So where does this leave Zuckerberg and Facebook? Running hard to try and catch a ship that may already have sailed — a ship whose ultimate destination is regulatory oversight of the network in some form or another. And political advertising is likely just the tip of a very large iceberg.

Over the years, a number of U.S. presidents have become synonymous with specific forms of communication, because of the way they used it to their advantage during their time in office. For Franklin Delano Roosevelt, it was the relatively new medium of radio, and for John F. Kennedy it was network television.

For better or worse, the 45th president, Donald J. Trump, is synonymous with Twitter. But he doesn’t just use it or take advantage of it — he lives and breathes it. It is a tool and also arguably a crutch, as well as a loose cannon. And that has raised a number of critical issues both for the media and arguably for the country.

Even before he became president, Twitter was a key part of Trump’s election strategy, and since the election it has become an even more crucial part of his public image. It’s how he kills time while watching TV in the morning or the evening, and it’s also how he gets the news cycle spinning, delivers the coup de gras to his enemies, and wages war on what he calls the “lying media.”

In fact, some believe that without Twitter, and the amplification that it provided for the messages of the Trump campaign, Trump would likely not have become president at all.

The Trump camp “successfully crowdsourced a message of anger and fear by leveraging the knowledge, contacts and skills of his followers,” law professor Shontavia Johnson argued in a piece for the academic site The Conversation.

“Trump’s posts created a feedback loop, whereby posts on social media made it to television news — getting for free what would have cost the equivalent of US$3 billion in media coverage and advertising costs.”

The exact value of the publicity the Trump campaign got by using this strategy could be debated, but there’s no question his use of Twitter provided endless fodder for media stories and TV hits. And the more outrageous his comments became, the more coverage they got.

It was a symbiotic relationship that benefited both sides. “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS,” Les Moonves of CBS said at one point (the CBS chairman said later that he was joking).

Those who followed Trump during his original career as a New York real estate developer have said this courting of publicity by any means possible is classic Trump, and that this approach was further developed during his time as a reality-TV host on The Apprentice. In many ways, Trump was primed to take advantage of a social-media platform like Twitter long before it even arrived.

Before he became president, there was some question whether Trump would continue tweeting after taking office — or even whether he would be allowed to do so, because of the potential security risks. But if anything, his Twitter dependency actually accelerated after he moved into the White House.

Just hours after being inaugurated, Trump provided a tangible sign of his Twitter obsession when he reportedly called the head of the National Park Service and ordered him to take down a tweet that a staffer had posted comparing the size of his inauguration crowd with that of former president Barack Obama.

Is it a good thing to have a president who tweets constantly? That depends on your perspective. Some argue that it not only makes the U.S. look bad on the international stage, but that it actually represents a looming national security risk — especially when Trump uses his Twitter account to pick fights with China or threaten open warfare with North Korea.

“In other circumstances, the transparency of a president who personally tweets might have been a revelation,” writer Navneet Alang wrote in an essay in the New Republic in November. But instead of relief from empty campaign statements, “we got a president who uses social media to enact revenge, spout conspiracy theories, and self-aggrandize.”

As Amanda Hess put it in an analysis of Trump’s tweeting habits in the New York Times, “Mr. Trump has always been hooked on recognition. He is obsessed with his television ratings. His office is festooned with decades-old magazine covers featuring himself. Even negative attention can be a win; he’s thrilled to be named Time’s ‘Person of the Year’ even if the cover might evoke images of both Hitler and Satan.”

Some of those close to the Trump administration have reportedly expressed a desire to keep the Commander-in-Chief from tweeting because of the potential damage it might cause. In one tangible example, several U.S. courts have struck down Trump’s proposed immigration ban aimed at Muslim countries in part because of sentiments he expressed on Twitter.

In particular, Trump made it clear in his tweets that the bill was intended to block Muslims, a move that would likely be unconstitutional because it would target people based on their religious beliefs.

As legal analyst Benjamin Wittes described it in a discussion of the 9th Circuit decision on the Lawfare blog, the court looked at “the extent to which the repeated and overt invocations of the most invidious motivations on the part of the President himself, his campaign, his adviser, and his Twitter feed.”

Even some foreign powers have spoken out about Trump’s tendency to shoot his mouth off on Twitter. A comment piece published by the official Chinese news agency Xinhua said the president’s obsession with using Twitter to make pronouncements is undesirable.

“Twitter shouldn’t become an instrument of foreign policy,” the agency said. The Xinhua commentary came not long after Trump said on Twitter that he was disappointed in the Chinese government for not doing more to help stop North Korea.

Despite what appear to be repeated attempts within the White House to curtail his Twitter use, however, Trump himself has said a number of times that he enjoys the directness of the platform — that is, the ability to speak to his supporters without having to go through the press.

“I’m covered so dishonestly by the press… that I can put it on Twitter [and] I can go bing bing bing and I just keep going and they put it on as soon as I tweet it out,” he said in an interview with a British MP and the former editor of the German newspaper Bild. “If I tell something to the papers and they don’t write it accurately, it’s really bad — they can’t do much when you tweet it.”

The pro-Trump conservative news site Breitbart News said in an editorial that one of the major successes of Trump’s campaign was “his ability to cut around a dying corporate media industry to speak directly to voters. It offered Americans a window into who Trump really is, and allowed him to essentially bypass the failing and corrupted corporate media.”

Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center at Columbia, argued in an essay about Trump’s use of Twitter that he behaves not like a president, but like a “loud, competitive, digitally attuned, populist media organization.” Trump, she says, “sees himself not just in opposition to the existing press but in competition with them.”

Trump’s use of Twitter also goes hand-in-hand with a more nefarious strategy the administration has pursued — namely, attempts to reduce the amount of official interactions that the president and/or his White House have with the media.

Trump has had an order of magnitude fewer press conferences since he was elected when compared to almost any other recent president. His administration has also shown a distinct preference for off-the-record briefings that can’t be recorded and aren’t public. And all of this has come amid ongoing complaints about “fake news” and the press.

The strategy is fairly obvious: Discredit the mainstream media, restrict their access, and then replace their reports with tweets directly from the president and occasional friendly interviews with outlets like Fox News and Breitbart.

In effect, Twitter allows Trump to provide the illusion of transparency and access without having to actually provide it. On the one hand, it provides an up-close look at what he is thinking, which some believe is valuable. But at the same time, it also allows him to state untruths with impunity, knowing that his tweets will be widely redistributed by his followers and the media, and to dodge follow-up questions or criticism.

Meanwhile, Trump’s use of Twitter has created a conundrum for the press: Does everything Trump publishes on Twitter by definition have to become a news story, simply because he is the president?

As the New York Times put it in a story earlier this year about Trump’s Twitter use: “Mr. Trump expertly exploits journalists’ unwavering attention to their Twitter feeds, their competitive spirit and their ingrained journalistic conventions — chiefly, that what the president says is inherently newsworthy.”

White House communications chief Sean Spicer exacerbated this problem when he said in June that Trump’s tweets should be considered official statements. Not long afterwards, a Twitter account called RealPressSecBot started republishing Trump tweets with a background image that makes them look like press releases printed on White House stationery.

The parody account highlights the problem: If Trump issued a press release saying the same things he says on Twitter, it would clearly be grounds for a news story. So why shouldn’t his tweets do the same?

Veteran media writer Jack Shafer says that Trump “has caught the press in something of a double bind. To ignore what a president does or what he says he intends to do would be journalistic malpractice.” In a very real sense, Shafer says, Trump acts as assignment editor for most of the major news outlets just by tweeting.

A number of senior journalists have argued that the media can’t just avoid mentioning what the president is tweeting about, especially if it is about an ongoing news story, or they wouldn’t be doing their jobs.

“This is the way he’s communicating with millions upon millions of people, and as journalists we can’t ignore that,” Politico editor Carrie Budoff Brown told the New York Times. Fox News anchor Chris Wallace said: “It’s the president talking, and I think you report it. Under any definition, it’s news, whether it’s sensible or not, factual or not.”

Others, however — including CJR editor Kyle Pope — have argued that covering every single tweet like it was official policy risks giving some of Trump’s more marginal or distracting tweets much more weight than they deserve, thereby stealing attention or resources from more important topics.

Some political observers have even speculated that Trump and the White House see his tweets in part as a way of distracting the media from more serious transgressions that are taking place, such as the administration’s alleged links to Russia.

Ben Shapiro, editor in chief of DailyWire.com, said in a recent interview with CNN that by focusing on every Trump tweet and foible, the media “is in danger of blowing its credibility.”

In some ways, reporting every tweet could actually backfire for news outlets. Writing articles and doing TV news hits about his comments effectively spread them even farther than they would go otherwise and also lend them added credibility — but at the same time, debunking or fact-checking those tweets is largely futile, because many Trump supporters already distrust the mainstream press.

Psychologists refer to this as the “boomerang effect.” Even if you marshal all the facts available about a topic, arguing with someone who already doesn’t trust you actually makes them more likely to continue believing the opposite.

Trump’s use of Twitter has sparked a debate over whether Twitter itself should ban the president from using the platform. According to a number of critics, Trump’s use of Twitter to attack everyone from Hillary Clinton to miscellaneous followers is a breach of the service’s standards, which forbid anyone from using their account to harass or abuse others.

Venture capitalist and former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao said in an essay published on Medium that Trump was “using his manipulation skills and your platform to bully others, and to incite supporters to harass people — both on Twitter and in real life.”

Even Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and CEO of Twitter, admitted in an interview at the Recode conference that his feelings about the president’s use of the platform are “complicated.”

On the one hand, it could be argued that Trump has done more to popularize and spread the reach of Twitter than any other single user in the company’s history. But his use of the platform to attack anyone he perceives as an enemy also has echoes of the bullying and harassment problems many associate with the service.

Minnesota congressman Keith Ellison called on Twitter to ban Trump in an interview with TMZ, calling him a bully. And more than 70,000 people have signed a petition asking the company to do the same.

Some believe that Trump should be barred from Twitter not because of harassment, but because his use of the platform poses a security risk (even some inside Twitter have raised this possibility, according to a recent report by The Verge). And the examples of how this might arise seem to be increasing daily.

After North Korea bragged about its ability to fit modified nuclear warheads into the nose-cone of a cruise missile, for example, Trump said that if it tried anything, the country would be met with a “fire and fury unlike anything the world has ever seen.” He then posted a series of tweets about how powerful the U.S. nuclear arsenal is.

According to a number of news reports, Trump’s statement was ad hoc — that is, made on the spur of the moment, without any consultation with his military or political advisers.

Could Trump actually tweet his way into a war between the U.S. and North Korea or some other hostile country? That might have seemed like a slightly paranoid fear just a year ago, but after the kind of behavior the president has shown a propensity for since moving into the White House, it doesn’t seem so far-fetched any more.

Trump’s use of Twitter also raises some interesting issues that have never been tackled by an administration before. For example, the Knight Foundation’s First Amendment Institute recently filed a lawsuit arguing that the president should not be allowed to block critics on Twitter from seeing his tweets.

This might seem like a but of a stretch legally, but the Institute argues that by having an official Twitter account, Trump and his administration have essentially created a public forum, and therefore restricting who can participate in that forum is a breach of their First Amendment rights.

“Though the architects of the Constitution surely didn’t contemplate presidential Twitter accounts, they understood that the President must not be allowed to banish views from public discourse simply because he finds them objectionable,” said Institute director Jameel Jaffer. “Having opened this forum to all comers, the President can’t exclude people from it merely because he dislikes what they’re saying.”

In a similar case, a court in Virginia recently ruled against a city official who blocked constituents on Facebook. “The suppression of critical commentary regarding elected officials is the quintessential form of viewpoint discrimination against which the First Amendment guards,” US District Judge James Cacheris said.

Trump may also have breached another federal law by deleting some of his tweets, according to some constitutional experts. Caroline Mala Corbin, a constitutional law professor at the University of Miami, told NBC News that the president may have violated the Presidential Records Act, a 1978 law passed after the Watergate scandal that requires all presidential writings be preserved.

In many ways, having the president post his thoughts publicly about everything from foreign policy to the weaknesses of his enemies is a dream come true for both journalists and political junkies.

After all, his tweets provide a real-time glimpse into the mind and mood of one of the world’s most powerful political leaders. Week-long news cycles have been built around a single update from Trump, with pundits parsing every syllable, and those stories are inevitably a traffic-generating machine for many cash-strapped media outlets.

And yet, even some of the journalists filing those stories likely wonder whether they are serving a larger purpose, or whether their coverage is the equivalent of Nero fiddling as Rome burns.

BuzzFeed: “The immediacy of Twitter — coupled with Trump’s distinctive style — amplifies the “tell it like it is” component of his image: People at Trump rallies say they love and look forward to his tweets, but that love is less for what they say (usually decrying something, calling someone a loser) and more for his willingness to say it. On Twitter, Trump doesn’t care who he offends or attacks, he has no fear of the status quo, he has no regard for social niceties. That posture, so effectively communicated through a medium like Twitter, further affirms his “outsider” status — and helps elide the privilege he’s enjoyed since birth.”

“In the weeks since the election, Twitter has become increasingly essential to the maintenance of Trump’s image and, by extension, his legitimacy as president-elect. He wields it like a flare gun: Don’t look here (the settlement of his Trump University lawsuit, which, upon close scrutiny, reveals that he bilked people like those who voted for him for millions), look here! (Mike Pence getting booed at Hamilton).” https://www.buzzfeed.com/annehelenpetersen/what-would-trump-be-without-twitter?utm_term=.mkxl7dLzO#.mtoNwkK0G

Poynter: “Vanity Fair is the latest news organization to profit from President-elect Donald Trump’s Twitter ire. The Condé Nast magazine has seen its subscriptions rise 100 fold Thursday after Donald Trump tweeted that the publication was “way down, big trouble, dead.” Within 24 hours, Vanity Fair added 13,000 subscribers. This is the highest number of subscriptions sold in a single day ever at Condé Nast, according to a spokesperson.” http://www.poynter.org/2016/vanity-fairs-subscriptions-soar-after-troll-y-trump-tweet/443165/

CNN: “Ben Shapiro, editor in chief of DailyWire.com, says that by focusing on every Trump tweet and foible, the media “is in danger of blowing its credibility.” http://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2016/11/20/trump-tweet-coverage-is-turned-up-to-11.cnn

New York Times: “Xinhua, the state news agency, has more or less asked Mr. Trump to shut up. “An obsession with ‘Twitter foreign policy’ is undesirable,” read the headline of a Xinhua commentary on Tuesday about Mr. Trump’s posts. “Everyone recognizes the common sense that foreign policy isn’t child’s play, and even less is it like doing business deals,” said the article, published after Mr. Trump’s latest barbed comments on China. “Twitter shouldn’t become an instrument of foreign policy,” the article said. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/04/world/asia/china-xinhua-donald-trump-twitter.html

The Verge: “Some of Trump’s tweets, notably his erratic tweets about nuclear policy, have generated calls for Twitter to ban the president-elect from the platform. Those discussions are now taking place inside Twitter as well, a current employee familiar with the matter told The Verge. “Banning is definitely a conversation that people are having, but only because we have to have the conversation,” the employee said. But a ban seems unlikely, this person said.” https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/12/14256818/donald-trump-twitter-ban-employee-reaction

BuzzFeed: Donald Trump’s Twitter account “is a security disaster waiting to happen” https://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/donald-trumps-twitter-account-is-a-security-disaster-waiting?utm_term=.ht30rQBeY#.ovZMEqNLb

The Verge: Jack Dorsey says his feelings about Donald Trump’s use of Twitter are “complicated” https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/6/13863782/jack-dorsey-feels-trump-twitter-complicated

The Verge: “Donald Trump used Twitter to make outrageous claims throughout his 2016 presidential campaign, and he’s still making them after winning the presidency. If he keeps it up as president, he will turn Twitter into a state-media machine capable of quickly and widely spreading disinformation.” https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/27/13758710/trump-is-turning-twitter-into-a-state-disinformation-machine

BuzzFeed: “It’s tricky and unprecedented territory for Twitter. Trump is obviously free to mention individuals by name on Twitter, especially as they relate to policy and governing. However, Trump’s new role as the most powerful leader in the free world as well as, his extreme visibility, and the history of his followers targeting and harassing his enemies create potential fallout that stands to affect real people, regardless of the intent with which they are made. Simply put: as President, the potential consequences of Trump’s speech make his case — and Twitter’s potential enforcement — somewhat unique.” https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/trumps-antagonistic-tweet-tests-the-limits-of-twitters-rules?utm_term=.awD98KjDa#.bfJ2V4pQK

Medium: Ellen Pao says “@realdonaldtrump is bringing out the worst of Twitter?—?the company, the platform, and its users. He’s using his manipulation skills and your platform to bully others, and to incite supporters to harass people?—?both on Twitter and in real life.” https://medium.com/@ekp/dear-jack-its-time-to-suspend-donald-trump-from-twitter-14ddbdd3250c

New York Times: “Mr. Trump expertly exploits journalists’ unwavering attention to their Twitter feeds, their competitive spirit and their ingrained journalistic conventions — chiefly, that what the president says is inherently newsworthy. As a developer and reality show star, he lobbied the news media for coverage. Now journalists feel obligated to pay attention to him. Mr. Trump overwhelms the media with boatloads of what was once a rare commodity: access. He creates impressions faster than journalists can check them. By the time they turn up the facts, the news cycle has moved on to his next missive, leaving less time (and reader attention) for the stories Mr. Trump does not highlight on his feed. Mr. Trump may not follow a deliberate distraction strategy, but he doesn’t need one. He distracts instinctively. All he needs is a phone, the press and whatever thought just entered his mind.” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/15/arts/trump-twitter-and-the-art-of-his-deal.html?nytmobile=0

Jack Shafer: “Presidents have always been able to shape the news agenda, or at least some of it, but Trump is in his own category: When he shrugs, or tweets, or signs some toothless but incendiary document, the press scrambles to its keyboards and fill its pages and the airwaves with the reaction. Trump has caught the press in something of a double bind. To ignore what a president does or what he says he intends to do would be journalistic malpractice. As long as he flashes his pen and his lungs hold out, and Sean Spicer serves additional swill in the briefing room, Trump will reign as our assignment editor, right?” http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/trump-is-now-assigning-the-news-214690

New Republic: “In other circumstances, the transparency of a president who personally tweets might have been a revelation. A president who took to a public platform to chip away at some of that disparity—even if it was just to relate personal, emotional statements rather than polished political narratives—might have helped the public believe that the government was acting out of a genuine interest to lead, rather than couching specific, ideological goals in a language meant to obscure them. Instead of relief from empty campaign statements, though, we got a president who uses social media to enact revenge, spout conspiracy theories, and self-aggrandize.” https://newrepublic.com/article/138753/trump-americas-first-twitter-president-afraid

Breitbart: “One of the major successes of President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign was his ability to cut around a dying corporate media industry to speak directly to voters. It offered Americans a window into who Trump really is, and allowed him to essentially bypass the failing and corrupted corporate media—most of whom essentially proved themselves with their actions to essentially be trying to tank the Trump campaign. They failed, and Trump succeeded.” http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/11/29/exclusive-how-trump-bypasses-corporate-media-reach-millions/

The Conversation: “Trump was remarkably effective at harnessing this type of social media power to influence opinions. His campaign successfully crowdsourced a message of anger and fear by leveraging the knowledge, contacts and skills of his followers to disseminate his tweets widely. For example, Trump would receive nearly double the number of Twitter mentions as Hillary Clinton each day, even though (or maybe because) his messages were much more negative. In addition, Trump’s posts created a feedback loop, whereby posts on social media made it to television news – getting for free what would have cost the equivalent of US$3 billion in media coverage and advertising costs. He ultimately spent less money per vote and per delegate than anyone running for president this year, but obtained the highest level of visibility.” http://theconversation.com/donald-trump-tweeted-himself-into-the-white-house-68561

Me at Fortune: “To see how this works, all you have to do is take a look at any Trump interaction with his supporters, whether through Twitter or Facebook (including his “Trump TV” broadcasts, which critics have attacked as low quality, thereby missing the point). Then look at the ripple effects of those events. In almost every case, Trump says something incendiary and/or inaccurate, his fans broadcast it far and wide, and then the traditional media picks it up and rehashes it ad nauseam. This is how the Republican candidate managed to generate more than $2 billion in estimated media coverage, completely free of charge. In the end, it didn’t even matter if that coverage was favorable or unfavorable, or if it focused on Trump’s lies. It was free publicity. And the more outrageous his behavior, the more coverage he got. In effect, Trump knew the media was caught in a Catch-22. Beyond a certain point, they couldn’t just ignore his campaign. (Although the Huffington Post certainly tried.) Not only did they have to cover it for ethical reasons, but they had to cover it for financial ones as well.” http://fortune.com/2016/11/07/trump-media-broken/

Quartz: “Donald Trump, editor-in-chief of the fake news movement” https://qz.com/846551/donald-trump-editor-in-chief-of-the-fake-news-movement/

New York Times: “President-elect Donald J. Trump claimed credit on Thursday night for persuading Ford to keep an automaking plant in Kentucky rather than moving it to Mexico. The only wrinkle: Ford was not actually planning to move the plant. Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter shortly after 9 p.m. that Ford’s chairman, William Clay Ford Jr., had just told him that Ford “will be keeping the Lincoln plant in Kentucky — no Mexico.” https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/18/us/politics/donald-trump-takes-credit-for-helping-to-save-a-ford-plant-that-wasnt-closing.html

Emily Bell: “While Donald Trump might represent an alien being to political reporters, his modus operandi is unsettlingly familiar to those who have covered corporate media. Trump’s behavior is not that of a “normal” president, or even a regular politician per se, but of a loud, competitive, digitally attuned, populist media organization. For Trump, the medium is not just the message, it is the office, too. For the organizations that cover Trump, one of the disorienting issues is that Trump does not rely on their interpretation or publicity; in many ways, Trump sees himself not just in opposition to the existing press but in competition with them, too. Framing Trump as a media entity should not diminish the seriousness with which we treat the power of a Trump Presidency. On the contrary, it is important that we examine just how potentially toxic the complete convergence between politics and media might be.” https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/donald_trump_media_organization.php

New York Times: “As news organizations grapple with covering a commander in chief unlike any other, Mr. Trump’s Twitter account — a bully pulpit, propaganda weapon and attention magnet all rolled into one — has quickly emerged as a fresh journalistic challenge and a source of lively debate. How to cover a president’s pronouncements when they are both provocative and maddeningly vague? Does an early-morning tweet amount to a planned shift in American policy? Should news outlets, as some readers argue, ignore clearly untrue tweets, rather than amplify falsehoods further? Fundamentally, she said, the thoughts of a president-elect are inherently newsworthy — as long as journalists also provide readers with the right context, like whether a proposal is feasible or legal, or correct a baseless claim. “This is the way he’s communicating with millions upon millions of people, and as journalists we can’t ignore that,” Ms. Brown said.“Anything that a president would say — even if it was libelous or scandalous — it’s the president talking, and I think you report it,” said Chris Wallace, the “Fox News Sunday” host who moderated this year’s third presidential debate. “Under any definition, it’s news, whether it’s sensible or not, factual or not, productive or not.” https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/29/business/media/if-trump-tweets-it-is-it-news-a-quandary-for-the-news-media.html

Knight First Amendment Institute demands Trump stop blocking people on Twitter: “This is a context in which the Constitution precludes the President from making up his own rules,” said Jameel Jaffer, the Knight Institute’s executive director. “Though the architects of the Constitution surely didn’t contemplate presidential Twitter accounts, they understood that the President must not be allowed to banish views from public discourse simply because he finds them objectionable. Having opened this forum to all comers, the President can’t exclude people from it merely because he dislikes what they’re saying.” https://knightcolumbia.org/news/knight-institute-demands-president-unblock-critics-twitter

New York Times: “Donald Trump’s relationship with the media may be obsessive, but it’s also deeply transactional — the media has always been a tool in his pursuit of fame and power. In previous decades, dealing with New York tabloids and national television, his tactic was to gain advantage within dominant media ecosystems; in dealing with the political press during the campaign,his approach had been to gain advantages not merely within media ecosystems but over them. To that end, he found great transactional value in Twitter. With tweets, he is able to reap the benefits of access — stories getting his message out, published by outlets that can find no justification for ignoring these particular words from the president, just because they appear on Twitter — and to create at least an appearance of transparency, but without actually granting any access at all.” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/magazine/donald-trump-and-the-theater-of-access.html?nytmobile=0

Trump attacking individuals on Twitter is menacing and predatory. It ensures threats and incites violence. It is disgusting and must stop.

— Jacob Weisberg (@jacobwe) December 8, 2016

Trump’s own tweets help to kill his Muslim travel ban: http://fortune.com/2017/06/12/trump-tweets-travel-ban/

Fears of a Trump Twitter bot war: http://fortune.com/2017/05/31/trump-twitter-bot-war/

Twitter as a window into Trump’s brain: http://fortune.com/2017/02/23/trump-twitter/

Trump’s CNN wrestling tweet is an incitement to violence, critics say: http://fortune.com/2017/07/02/trump-wrestling-tweet/

Trump talks about his use of Twitter: http://fortune.com/2017/01/17/trump-loves-twitter/

Sean Spicer says he has no idea what Trump is going to tweet: http://fortune.com/2017/01/05/trump-twitter-news/

Wall Street Journal: “in 140-character increments, Mr. Trump diminished his own standing by causing a minor international incident, demonstrated that the loyalty he demands of the people who work for him isn’t reciprocal, set back his policy goals and wasted time that he could have devoted to health care, tax reform or “infrastructure week.” Mark it all down as further evidence that the most effective opponent of the Trump Presidency is Donald J. Trump.” https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-buck-stops-everywhere-else-1496705412

NBC News: “Even beyond cybersecurity, the ad-hoc approach suggests the Trump White House has not fully adjusted to the complexities of life in the federal government. When Trump deleted a tweet, he likely violated the President Records Act, a 1978 law that requires all presidential writings be preserved. Congress recently amended it to include electronic records. “If he uses his Twitter account for official presidential business, it should be subject to the Presidential Records Act,” Caroline Mala Corbin, a constitutional law professor at the University Miami, said. Congress passed the law “after the Watergate scandal and President Nixon’s attempt to hide his records,” she said, to establish that all presidential records “must be preserved.” http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/twitter-presidency-experts-see-both-risks-rewards-trump-n712771

Politico: “President Donald Trump’s Twitter feed — packed with more than 35,000 time-stamped missives dating to 2009 — offers a treasure-trove of evidence for Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his growing team of investigators, according to lawyers and veterans of past White House scandals. Like emails, handwritten notes or transcribed Oval Office conversations, the @realdonaldtrump account gives investigators a detailed timeline of Trump’s thoughts and opinions — including where they might differ from official accounts — and can also be used to establish intent, which can be critical in a criminal investigation.” http://www.politico.com/story/2017/06/02/trump-tweets-russia-probes-239040

Not surprisingly, given the topic, a recent piece at BuzzFeed about the high-profile tweeting habits of two NBC staffers has sparked a wide range of responses, most of them snarky. There’s nothing Media Twitter loves (or loves to hate) more than an article that is all about Media Twitter.

A lot of the criticism came from those who believe that Bradd Jaffy (an editor and writer with NBC News) and Kyle Griffin (a producer with MSNBC) are doing one or both of these two bad things:

1) Taking material from their employer and using it to bolster their own Twitter followings, and/or

2) Using content from other news outlets to do the same thing, without adding any kind of insight or commentary apart from maybe an emoji.

From the story: “Critics — many of them other reporters — see it as as drafting off the success of someone else’s tweets. They see Griffin or Jaffy’s emojis as ways of adding their own brand on top of someone making or breaking actual news while adding very little value of their own.”

I don’t see much truth in this kind of criticism, to be honest. Many of those I’ve seen slamming Jaffy and Griffin for doing this (and Yashar Ali, who is quoted praising the two) do something very similar themselves, but haven’t gotten the same kind of following and are likely jealous.

Also, to journalists who spend every waking moment checking the newswire (i.e., Twitter) and know every nuance of every story, Jaffy and Griffin may not be seen as adding much, or be seen as drafting off the work of others. But at however small a level, they are providing a service to readers, and they promote the work of the journalists they link to. That’s good enough for me.

https://twitter.com/bernstein/status/892811128362938369

The part that interests me the most is the criticism that they are taking content from NBC and using it without permission in a way that benefits their Twitter brand. As a number of others have pointed out, the fact that some of this criticism comes from within NBC itself just reinforces how behind the curve much of that organization still is.

This kind of pushback reminds me of when I was promoting the idea of social media platforms like Twitter as a tool for journalism, as the first social-media editor at the Globe and Mail in Toronto. The same kind of arguments were made — and that was almost 10 years ago.

The thinking then was that the Globe itself needed to get all of the attention, and so only the institutional account should be tweeting the news. In part, this was because some editors were concerned that individual writers would get larger brands than the paper, and then take all those followers with them when they left (which is in fact exactly what happened in many cases).

That kind of fear may be understandable, but still futile. The fact is that in almost every case, a personal account on Twitter — even a bad one, or one that adds no more original content than an emoji — is always going to be more engaging and more effective than an institutional one. Social media is called that because it is designed to be social, and no one wants to be social with a faceless institutional brand.

If it is smart, NBC will give Jaffy and Griffin whatever leeway they need, and build whatever it can around them while they are still around. The more it tries to control them and their tweeting, the less effective they will be.

Source: This Is Probably The Only Story You Didn’t Hear About First From Bradd Jaffy And Kyle Griffin

Campbell Brown, the former NBC and CNN broadcaster who is now Facebook’s head of news partnerships, confirmed in a speech at a digital publishing conference that the social network plans to roll out support for subscriptions as part of its mobile Instant Articles platform.

There have been multiple reports that the company was working on such a plan, including a recent piece by Digiday that quoted a number of sources, but Brown’s speech is the first official confirmation. She said testing of the new feature will begin in October.

This plan is likely to cause at least some cheering in media land, because a number of publishers have been clamoring for paywall support from Facebook, and criticizing the lackluster performance of the existing Instant Articles format when it comes to generating revenue.

As with most things involving Facebook, however, this deal sounds like a classic Faustian bargain.

According to Brown, subscriptions will work this way: If a publisher chooses to implement support for a paywall, readers will get 10 articles for free — in much the same way they do with the New York Times’ “metered” access plan. After that, they will be prompted to sign up for a subscription. If they already have one, Facebook says it will make it easy for them to log in.

And what about the revenue — will there be some kind of sharing plan, where Facebook takes a percentage, the way Apple does with its 30%? The company isn’t saying, but it seems likely that there will be, although perhaps not to begin with.

Update: In a statement on Wednesday, Brown said “Quality journalism costs money to produce, and we want to make sure it can thrive on Facebook. As part of our test to allow publishers in Instant Articles to implement a paywall, they will link to their own websites to process subscriptions and keep 100% of the revenue.” 

Brown also said the social network would give publishers control over all of the reader and subscription data involved in the process, which is also likely to come as good news to many. At least they don’t have to hand all of that over to Facebook as well as all of their content. But that doesn’t mean this deal is something media companies should leap at.

http://twitter.com/mikeisaac/status/887516605214621696

The context to this offer, as a number of people have pointed out, is that Facebook is taking some sustained fire for its dominance of the advertising industry (along with Google), with the News Media Alliance arguing its members should be exempted from antitrust laws so that they can present a combined front in bargaining with the digital giants. I wrote about that idea in a previous post.

Not only that, but a number of publishers — including the New York Times, an early partner — have talked openly about how Instant Articles has proven to be a bit of a bust revenue-wise. Some have turned their back on the platform completely, despite Facebook’s attempts to improve things.

But the bottom line with this subscription offering is the same as it has been with Instant Articles and Facebook video and half a dozen other things the social networking behemoth has come up with: They are fundamentally designed to benefit Facebook, and to centralise control in its hands, and to generate as much content as possible. Any benefits they provide to media companies are ancillary at best.

If you connect your subscription plan to Facebook, will you get increased reach? Probably. Will it help you drive some new sign-ups? Perhaps. But it’s important to remember that the entity in control of every aspect of that relationship is Facebook, not you — Facebook decides who sees what and when, what it looks like, how it functions, and how much revenue you will get.

In other words, you are working on land that has been given to you by a feudal lord, and that rarely ends well.