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Note: A version of this post was originally published in the daily newsletter from the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer.

It’s been awhile since Twitter did something that got everyone talking and didn’t involve the former president of the United States. On Tuesday, the social network managed to do just that when it announced that it has acquired a company called Revue, which specializes in helping journalists and other writers set up their own email subscription newsletters. If this sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the exact same business model as Substack, which has become a darling of both venture-capital investors and journalists for its ability to turn newsletters into cold, hard cash. As Ben Smith, the New York Times media writer, pointed out in a recent column, Substack has helped Heather Cox Richardson turn her knowledge of US political history into a subscription business that is said to be worth about $1 million in annual revenue, and a number of leading journalists with various publications have quit recently to set up shop on the Substack platform, including former Intercept writer Glenn Greenwald, Andrew Sullivan, Matt Yglesias, Anne Helen Peterson, and Casey Newton.

Does this mean Twitter is going to be competing head-to-head with Substack? Yes, in the sense that every company that offers subscription email newsletter services is a competitor, including MailChimp, TinyLetter, and others. And according to a Times report, Twitter tried to acquire Substack at some point last year, but was rebuffed—which suggests that it very much wants to be in that business. Whether Substack should be worried or not is harder to answer. On the one hand, it is much larger than Revue, a small Dutch company with just six employees: Substack has raised more than $17 million and says it has more than 250,000 subscribers generating more than $7 million in revenue (of which Substack takes 10 percent). Attracting writers like Yglesias and sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has also given it a lot of brand recognition. For his part, Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie tweeted: “General Motors announces the Bolt” following the Twitter announcement, referring to the automaker’s attempt to compete with the much sexier and more popular Tesla electric vehicle.

Bravado aside, Twitter has even more resources than Substack could ever hope to have: the company is worth $38 billion in terms of stock-market value, and its sister company Square (which is also run by Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey) is a payment-processing service that would probably come in very handy when dealing with subscription revenue and payment. In addition, Twitter says in the blog post announcing the Revue acquisition that it has a lot of plans for things it can offer to boost the service and make it more appealing to Twitter users—including allowing people to sign up for newsletters from those they follow, and even paying writers with newsletters in return for converting Twitter users to subscribers. As an additional sweetener right out of the gate, the company dropped the amount the service charges from 6 percent of subscription revenue to 5 percent, half what Substack takes.

Continue reading “Twitter gets into the newsletter business—should Substack be worried?”

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

It’s been awhile since Twitter did something that got everyone talking and didn’t involve the former president of the United States. On Tuesday, the social network managed to do just that when it announced that it has acquired a company called Revue, which specializes in helping journalists and other writers set up their own email subscription newsletters. If this sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the exact same business model as Substack, which has become a darling of both venture-capital investors and journalists for its ability to turn newsletters into cold, hard cash. As Ben Smith, the New York Times media writer, pointed out in a recent column, Substack has helped Heather Cox Richardson turn her knowledge of US political history into a subscription business that is said to be worth about $1 million in annual revenue, and a number of leading journalists with various publications have quit recently to set up shop on the Substack platform, including former Intercept writer Glenn Greenwald, Andrew Sullivan, Matt Yglesias, Anne Helen Peterson, and Casey Newton.

Does this mean Twitter is going to be competing head-to-head with Substack? Yes, in the sense that every company that offers subscription email newsletter services is a competitor, including MailChimp, TinyLetter, and others. And according to a Times report, Twitter tried to acquire Substack at some point last year, but was rebuffed—which suggests that it very much wants to be in that business. Whether Substack should be worried or not is harder to answer. On the one hand, it is much larger than Revue, a small Dutch company with just six employees: Substack has raised more than $17 million and says it has more than 250,000 subscribers generating more than $7 million in revenue (of which Substack takes 10 percent). Attracting writers like Yglesias and sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has also given it a lot of brand recognition. For his part, Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie tweeted: “General Motors announces the Bolt” following the Twitter announcement, referring to the automaker’s attempt to compete with the much sexier and more popular Tesla electric vehicle.

Bravado aside, Twitter has even more resources than Substack could ever hope to have: the company is worth $38 billion in terms of stock-market value, and its sister company Square (which is also run by Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey) is a payment-processing service that would probably come in very handy when dealing with subscription revenue and payment. In addition, Twitter says in the blog post announcing the Revue acquisition that it has a lot of plans for things it can offer to boost the service and make it more appealing to Twitter users—including allowing people to sign up for newsletters from those they follow, and even paying writers with newsletters in return for converting Twitter users to subscribers. As an additional sweetener right out of the gate, the company dropped the amount the service charges from 6 percent of subscription revenue to 5 percent, half what Substack takes.

Continue reading “Twitter gets into the newsletter business—should Substack be worried?”

Note: This post was originally published at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

It’s a relatively innocuous job ad on LinkedIn, looking for an executive editor. It says things like “our editorial mission is to be the go-to place for understanding technology, innovation, and change, as it impacts all of our lives” and “we are unapologetically pro-tech, pro-future, pro-change.” Pretty anodyne stuff, typical of half a dozen tech publications. Except that this job isn’t with a magazine or news website — it was posted earlier this month by Andreessen Horowitz, a leading Silicon Valley venture-capital firm known for its early investments in companies like Facebook, Airbnb, and Slack. As first reported by technology writer Eric Newcomer and tech insider publication The Information, the company is hiring an executive editor and an opinion editor.

Andreessen Horowitz already publishes op-ed style pieces on its website, with titles like “It’s Time to Heal: 16 Trends Driving the Future of Bio and Healthcare,” and it has a well-regarded podcast hosted by Sonal Chokshi, a former Wired editor. But the new hires appear to be part of an aggressive expansion of the firm’s editorial efforts. The job ad says Andreessen plans to “dramatically scale our editorial operation across coverage areas and mediums.” In a blog post, Margit Wennmachers, the architect of the firm’s media strategy, said the company plans to create a standalone media entity, and named the new executive editor: Maggie Leung, a former journalist who has worked for the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and CNN.

Many companies, including a number of venture-capital firms, produce their own editorial content, as a way of promoting the companies they have invested in, and also of marketing the insights of their founders so that others will come to them for financing. But Andreessen Horowitz has arguably done more of this than just about anyone else. One of the firm’s former analysts, Benedict Evans, has described it as “a media company that monetizes through VC.” And the strategy has intensified over the past few years, observers say, as the prevailing mood towards Silicon Valley and technology giants like Google and Facebook has changed from fairly uncritical boosterism to what some tech founders seem to see as hyper-critical attacks.

Continue reading “Andreessen Horowitz, a Silicon Valley venture capital behemoth, plans to eat the media”

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

More than three years after the idea was first floated by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, the company’s arms-length “Oversight Board” finally started hearing its first cases last month, a selection that some found underwhelming for a body that has been in development for so long. Whatever their merits, those cases have all been overshadowed by Thursday’s announcement that Facebook has asked its version of the Supreme Court to rule on whether the company was right to ban president Donald Trump from the platform. That ban came on January 7, a day after a mob stormed the Capitol building, following a rally in which Trump argued that the election was stolen from him. “We believe the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great,” Zuckerberg wrote. “We are extending the block we have placed on his Facebook and Instagram accounts indefinitely and for at least the next two weeks until the peaceful transition of power is complete.”

In announcing that the Oversight Board would review this decision, Facebook made it clear that it still believes banning Trump’s account permanently was the right move, but said that if the board disagrees, then the company will reverse the ban. “We believe our decision was necessary and right,” wrote Nick Clegg, the former British deputy prime minister who is now Facebook’s vice-president of global communications. However, Clegg added that, “given its significance, we think it is important for the board to review it and reach an independent judgment on whether it should be upheld.” While the company waits for the board’s decision, Clegg said that Trump’s account will remain suspended. As outlined in the documents that govern the Oversight Board, the former president is entitled to submit a response arguing why the ban on his account is unreasonable and/or should be overturned. Some have argued that what Facebook really wants is for the board to order it to reinstate Trump, so that it can deflect responsibility for getting him back on the platform, where he drives a lot of engagement, which in turn translates into revenue for Facebook.

The Oversight Board is a controversial entity — not surprising, given that nothing like it really exists anywhere, and the fact that Facebook’s decisions on content affect not only the former president but billions of users around the world. In his blog post about the Trump decision, Clegg said that the board is “an independent body and its decisions are binding — they can’t be overruled by CEO Mark Zuckerberg or anyone else at Facebook.” This is true to a certain extent: i.e, it’s what the charter and the other official documents that created the board say, that it is supposed to be an independent body, that Facebook can’t overrule its decisions, etc. (unless doing so would be a breach of the law in any of the countries or jurisdictions where the company operates). Facebook does provide the board’s funding, however. And the charter isn’t a legally binding document, which means Facebook could choose to ignore its ruling, although it would obviously suffer some loss of trust if it were to do that.

Continue reading “Facebook asks its new Supreme Court to rule on banning Trump”

Note: A version of this post was originally published in the daily newsletter from the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer.

As Donald Trump’s rhetoric became increasingly disconnected from reality during the election campaign, spreading conspiracy theories about widespread voting fraud (for which there is absolutely no evidence), Twitter and Facebook both took to adding disclaimers, labels, and other warnings on his statements, and in some of the worst cases blocked them from being seen until the president deleted them. But after the storming of the Capitol building by Trump supporters, both platforms have banned the president from their services completely, with Twitter spending a considerable amount of time playing Whac-a-Mole blocking other accounts that Trump tried to use to spread his message after his was permanently disabled. And now, a wave of bans against both Trump and his prominent supporters has spread across much of the social web — YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, SnapChat, etc. — as well as payment services and financial intermediaries like PayPal, Venmo, Stripe and GoFundMe.

This kind of de-platforming isn’t unprecedented: It happened to right-wing gadfly Milo Yiannopolous, and then to Alex Jones of InfoWars, and to Gab (a right-wing would-be alternative to Twitter), and to 8chan, a Reddit-style community now known as 8kun. But it’s the first time the nuclear option has been used against a president of the United States. And even as the nation was trying to come to terms with the Capitol riot, the actions taken against Trump were raising questions: his supporters claimed it was an affront to his First Amendment rights (despite the fact that the First Amendment only applies to actions taken by the government). For some critics, the question was why the platforms didn’t act sooner. For others, the concern was more about whether private entities should ever have that kind of power over speech. But as troubling as the president’s de-platforming might be, some of the most dedicated defenders of free speech and individual rights said they agreed with the ban.

Jameel Jaffer of the Knight First Amendment Institute said while the platforms should be biased in favor of leaving the speech of political leaders up, “there are limits to this principle. A political leader who uses his account to incite violence is causing harms that can’t be countered by speech.” When the platforms believe a leader is doing so, he says, they’re justified in suspending his account. Jillian York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation pointed out that the removal of a president might seem surprising, but when you look outside the US, “you would see that Facebook has booted off Lebanese politicians and Burmese generals, never mind the millions of others who have been booted by these platforms, often without cause.” Kate Ruane of the ACLU, however, said in a statement that “it should concern everyone when companies like Facebook and Twitter wield the unchecked power to remove people from platforms that have become indispensable for the speech of billions.”

Continue reading “Platform ban of Trump and Parler raises questions about speech and power”

Note: A modified version of this post appeared in the daily newsletter published by the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer.

Less than an hour after Congress started ratifying the electoral college votes that gave Joe Biden a win in the presidential election, hundreds of camouflage-wearing Trump supporters — egged on by the president’s claims that the election was stolen from him — stormed the Capitol building on Wednesday and forced their way inside. As members of Congress left the Senate and House chambers, taking the electoral college votes with them, rioters in paramilitary gear and wearing QAnon symbols filled the room, taking photos of themselves standing on the dais by the Speaker’s chair, and sitting in her office with their feet on her desk. Amid the melee, a woman was shot, reportedly by police, and later died of her injuries — she was identified as Ashli Babbit, a 14-year veteran of the Air Force. According to CNN, it was the first time the Capitol building had been breached since the War of 1812. By 6 pm, Associated Press quoted authorities as saying the Capitol was secure, and the National Guard was on the scene. One report said shots were fired within the Capitol building at one point, but most of those who occupied the building appeared to have been allowed to leave peacefully, although DC police reported there were about a dozen arrests. Fighting between police and rioters continued near the Capitol through the night.

“We are watching an attempted sedition,” Jake Tapper said on CNN during the occupation. “We are watching an attempt at a bloodless coup in the United States.” Though police deployed smoke explosives to try to halt crowds, the demonstrators managed to push the police line up the steps on the east side of the Capitol. Then a small group broke into the building, according to the Washington Post. One video posted on TikTok appeared to show Capitol police encouraging demonstrators to enter the Capitol, and other videos posted to TikTok appeared to show members of the police taking friendly photos with those who illegally entered the building. Capitol Police briefly ordered evacuations of two buildings — the Library of Congress James Madison Memorial Building and the Cannon House Office Building, both just across from the Capitol. Representative Elaine Luria, a Democrat whose office is in the Cannon building, tweeted: “I just had to evacuate my office because of a pipe bomb reported outside.” Luria also said she heard gun shots near her office.

“This is what you’ve gotten, guys,” Republican Senator Mitt Romney yelled as the mayhem unfolded in the Senate chamber, according to the New York Times live-blog of the events, apparently addressing his colleagues. The Times described “a scene of chaos and confusion seldom witnessed in the history of the capital,” with hundreds of protesters barreling past fence barricades. Just after 3 pm, MSNBC showed a woman being taken out of the Capitol on a stretcher, covered in blood, and a news report later said the woman had died of her injuries. “This is a coup attempt,” Republican Representative Adam Kinzinger said on Twitter. Washington Post reporter Aaron Davis said the Defense Department initially refused a request from DC officials to deploy the National Guard, but later relented (the Times said this was authorized by vice president Pence, not by Trump). “Amazing how the national guard gets deployed with the quickness in anticipation of protests when police kill someone but when Trump holds his fascist coup rally the national guard is nowhere in sight,” said Bree Newsome Bass. David Corn of Mother Jones wrote that Trump “is now a terrorist leader.”

Continue reading “Shots fired inside the US Capitol as Trump supporters storm the barricades”

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

It’s not surprising that the announcement last week of an antitrust lawsuit against Facebook has gotten a lot of media attention. Not only is Facebook a company that virtually everyone uses or at least knows about, but mammoth cases like this one (which involves the Federal Trade Commission and 46 states) are extremely rare. There have only been half a dozen or so of this magnitude in the last 50 years, and only the Microsoft case from the late 1990s and possibly the AT&T breakup even come close to this one in size and impact. But once the fanfare of the announcement cools down, the history of such cases shows that what almost inevitably happens is not a swift victory for justice (however one might define that term) but rather a seemingly never-ending period — years, and in some cases decades — of protracted legal wrangling, a process that is almost mind-numbingly boring for most people, satisfying no one apart from the legions of corporate lawyers and academics for whom it provides something close to full employment. And the ending is likely to be a carefully negotiated settlement.

Even more than Microsoft, this case in particular is complicated by the fact that antitrust law was designed as a weapon to go after railroads and oil magnates who controlled access to physical goods with obvious market value, not a corporation whose product costs nothing and yet is used daily by billions of people. On top of that, the last several decades of antitrust court decisions have cemented the idea that the main target of antitrust law is consumer harm, which is traditionally defined as either high prices or the restriction of choice, or both. The former makes no sense in the context of Facebook, and even the latter is a stretch. The FTC’s argument is that harm should be broadly defined to mean a lack of privacy, the sharing of personal data, etc., but that is likely to be an uphill climb. Not that it isn’t true, but the concept has not been established yet in a legal sense, and courts may be skeptical of it (it was initially advanced by legal scholar Dina Srinivasan in a paper titled “The Antitrust Case Against Facebook”). And the question of whether Facebook has prevented users from exercising freedom of choice also requires the FTC and the states to jump through some large hoops in order to make that case.

The complaint argues that Facebook has a monopoly over a specific market, which it defines as “personal social networking,” i.e. the sharing of information with family and friends. But there is no consensus on whether that is even a discrete market, let alone whether Facebook controls enough of it to matter in a legal sense. A court could decide that TikTok is fundamentally in the same market, or Snapchat for that matter, and between them they have almost half a billion users and significant market strength. And if Facebook doesn’t control a monopoly on anything, then the anti-competitive behavior it has engaged in (of buying Instagram and WhatsApp for example) just becomes the normal kind of competitive behavior that all large technology companies engage in. We may all believe and understand that Facebook is huge and powerful, but that’s not enough to meet the antitrust test — the FTC has to show that it became that way illegally, and/or maintains that position through illegal means.

Continue reading “Facebook and antitrust: A slam-dunk case, or a decades-long fight in the making?”