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The word roller-coaster doesn’t even begin to describe the ride that Twitter shareholders have been on so far this week — and it’s not over yet by a long shot.

First, the company’s share price price [fortune-stock symbol=”TWTR”] zoomed higher early in the week, on reports that the company could be a takeover target for several large tech and media companies, including Google, Disney and Salesforce. But late Wednesday, the stock collapsed after reports that poured cold water on that initial enthusiasm.

When the stock opened for trading on Thursday morning, it was almost 20% lower than it had been the day before. That wiped more than $2 billion from the company’s market capitalization.

According to anonymous sources who spoke to Recode, neither Google nor Disney are interested in making a bid for the company, although both have reportedly taken a look at doing so. Apple is also not considering an acquisition of the social network, according to similar reports.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

By all accounts, the process of selling Twitter is well under way. The company has hired an investment advisor and is expected to start receiving bids later this week from a group of interested parties that reportedly includes Google, Salesforce and Disney.

As it does in almost every case in which a once-promising technology company is about to be acquired, Twitter’s likely sale represents both a success and a failure.

But Twitter’s (TWTR) story is also a story of failure—a failure to capitalize on that early promise and a failure to properly manage the company’s growth or strategy.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg once famously described Twitter as “a clown car that drove into a gold mine,” and for much of its history the clownish aspects of the company have been far more obvious than the golden parts. In a very real sense, it’s almost a miracle that the service still exists at all considering all the turmoil and upheaval in the executive suite.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

One of the most reliable things about the current election campaign is that on any given day, Republican candidate Donald Trump is almost certain to say something on Twitter that will set off alarm bells or cause some kind of controversy. And Friday morning was no exception to that rule.

Despite the fact that Trump was widely viewed as having lost the recent debate with Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, and that the election itself is just over a month away, the candidate chose to tweet not about the political issues in the campaign but about his dislike of former Miss Universe contestant Alicia Machado.

After the debate, he talked at length on Fox News about how Machado allegedly gained 60 pounds, and how he tried to support her after the pageant wanted to fire her.

Then early Friday morning, Trump chose for some unknown reason to unleash a series of tweets about her allegedly unsavory past, combined with a conspiracy theory about her relationship with Clinton. He called Machado “my worst Miss Universe,” and said Clinton was duped into referring to her in the debate.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Facebook routinely denies that it is a media entity, or that it should be expected to behave like one, and yet the giant social network continues to behave in ways that have a significant and tangible impact on the news that its users see about the world, and the practice of journalism in general.

In the latest example of this behavior, Facebook recently suspended the accounts of several Palestinian journalists without providing any warning or any explanation.

According to Al Jazeera, four editors from the Shehab News Agency — which has more than 6.3 million likes on Facebook — and three executives from the equally popular Quds News Network reported that they were suddenly unable to access their personal accounts.

After the journalists complained to Facebook, their accounts were reinstated, and the company apologized for what it said was a mistake. “Our team processes millions of reports each week, and we sometimes get things wrong,” a spokesman said, suggesting that the accounts were flagged by users.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

The Internet’s fact-checking engines were working overtime during Monday night’s presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Even Clinton’s home page turned into a fact-checking site to debunk the Republican candidate’s statements. But will it matter to his fan base?

As expected, given his performance so far, the Republican candidate repeatedly stretched the truth, denied making certain statements despite ample evidence to the contrary, and twisted the facts until they broke.

According to one estimate, Trump made more than 34 comments that were either lies or mis-statements of fact during the debate. Clinton, by comparison, was tagged with four. According to much of the post-debate analysis, Trump also came off looking like a bully.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

It says a lot about the state of the U.S. election campaign that one of the most hotly debated topics is whether a debate moderator should call out obvious lies by either Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton when they face each other Monday night.

To someone who hasn’t been following the circus sideshow/train wreck that is the Election 2016 campaign, this might seem like a bizarre thing to get hung up on.

After all, isn’t checking facts what journalists are supposed to do—even cable TV journalists? Isn’t that why we have journalists as debate moderators in the first place? As with many things involving Trump, it isn’t quite that simple.

Lester Holt, the NBC news anchor who is moderating the first debate Monday night, hasn’t said whether he plans to call out any untruths, but according to Politico, none of the major networks have committed to doing real-time fact checking of the debates.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

The list of potential Twitter acquirers continues to grow. In addition to recent reports that Salesforce and Google are interested in possibly buying the real-time news service, Disney is now said to be considering an acquisition bid as well.

According to a report from Bloomberg News, anonymous sources familiar with the situation said that the giant news and entertainment conglomerate is “working with a financial adviser to evaluate a possible bid for Twitter.”

In other words, Disney and an investment firm are going over Twitter’s financial data and looking at the potential benefits of combining the two companies, but that process could fall apart or be shelved at any point.

Salesforce and Google are said to be in a similar situation, according to a number of recent reports, which said Twitter is working with Goldman Sachs to consider potential takeover offers for the company.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

According to a new Gallup poll, trust in mass media in the United States is lower than it has ever been since the organization started asking that question in 1972. To put that in some kind of context, Richard Nixon was president in 1972 and the U.S. was bombing Vietnam.

Why would trust in the media be so low? There are a number of reasons, but one of the most obvious ones is that today’s media landscape looks nothing like what U.S. news consumers took for granted in 1972, or 1982 or 1992, or even 2002.

In many ways, the rise of the Internet and the social web has made things a lot better when it comes to being informed about the world, but in other ways–as with so many other things the Internet touches–it has made them much worse. And our trusted relationship with media (to the extent that we ever had one) has taken the brunt of the damage.

Instead of a handful of newspapers, TV channels and trusted journalists, we now have what amounts to the biblical Tower of Babel: Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of news sources, many of which are simply repeating whatever they think might get readers or viewers to click.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Facebook is more than just a site where people share photos of their children or pets. It has become a crucial way in which hundreds of millions of people get information about the world around them. And the tension between those two things is becoming difficult to ignore.

In the latest controversy involving the giant social network’s news judgement, Facebook removed an iconic photo from the Vietnam War: A picture of a young Kim Phuc running naked down a road after her village was hit by napalm.

When a Norwegian newspaper editor—who posted the photo as part of a series on war photography—tried to re-post it, along with a response from Phuc herself, his account was suspended.

The editor-in-chief of the newspaper, Espen Egil Hansen, then wrote an open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg criticizing him for doing so, entitled “Dear Mark. I am writing this to inform you that I shall not comply with your requirement to remove this picture.”

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

If there’s one thing that has been driving Twitter’s share price over the past year or so, it’s the repeated rumors that the company is going to be acquired. With every new rumor or speculation, the share price sees a little spike, as weary investors hope for the best.

But is an acquisition likely? And if so, who might buy it, and for how much? Those are the multibillion-dollar questions that crop up every time there is a new report about a bid.

According to a report at Recode, the company is going to consider the possibility of a sale at a board meeting later this week—although as many observers pointed out, such things are often discussed at meetings even when there is no offer on the table. Nevertheless, that report also pushed the stock up.

Unfortunately for long-time Twitter investors, the ones who have been stuck with it ever since it hit $70 in the weeks following its IPO, these rumors and the spikes they create ironically make the problem worse.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

A decade is a long time even in the real world, and on the Internet it is more like a century, especially in the life of a startup. But that’s how long it has been since Facebook launched the real-time news feed that has become the core of the service for more than 1.5 billion people.

It’s hard to even imagine the social network now without this essential feature, as early Facebook staffer Andrew “Boz” Bosworth recalled during a discussion with CEO Mark Zuckerberg and three other members of the original news-feed team on Tuesday (hosted via Facebook’s live-streaming video service, of course).

At that time, the site “was just a page with a big finger pointing at the number of new posts you had,” Boz said. Users had to click on the profiles of each of the people they were friends with, and then try to remember what their last post was, and whether anything had changed.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

During a discussion in Rome recently, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg denied that his company is a media entity. “No, we are a tech company, not a media company,” he said. But is that description accurate? Not really.

Zuckerberg may not want to admit it, but Facebook is one of the largest and most powerful media companies in the world, and getting larger.

The Facebook co-founder told his Italian audience that the social network isn’t a media company because “we do not produce any content.” Instead, Facebook just builds tools that allow users to interact with each other, which includes sharing news, he said.

But is creating content the only way to define whether a company is a media company? No. To take just one recent example, The Huffington Post didn’t create much of its own content in the early days, before it hired a reporting staff. Users created blog posts and HuffPo distributed and monetized them.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Gawker Media founder Nick Denton said goodbye to his former company this week, after broadcaster Univision agreed to acquire the publisher of popular websites such as Gizmodo and Jezebel for $135 million, as part of a court-ordered bankruptcy auction.

Univision has agreed to hire 95% of the company’s former employees, but Denton isn’t among them. However, the Gawker founder does get a consolation prize: According to the acquisition documents, he is to be paid $16,666 a month for the next two years as part of a non-compete clause.

The agreement, which Univision reportedly insisted on as part of the acquisition, says that Denton agrees not to “associate with any business enterprise” that is engaged in the same business as Gawker in either the U.S., Puerto Rico or Hungary, without getting permission from Univision first.

Although most of the content for Gawker Media’s websites was created in New York, where the company recently leased an office near Union Square, much of the web development and technical work behind the sites was done by a separate subsidiary based in Hungary. According to the Wall Street Journal, Denton was paid $500,000 a year by Gawker.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

The court-ordered bankruptcy auction of Gawker Media approached its final conclusion on Thursday, with most of company’s assets set to be acquired by Univision for $135 million. But one thing that isn’t part of the deal is Gawker.com—the website that launched an alternative blogging empire almost 14 years ago.

In other words, while some of Gawker will continue to live on, as Univision absorbs existing verticals like Gizmodo and Jezebel, what many saw as the heart and soul of the company (to the extent it had either one of those things) will no longer exist. Staff were notified by founder Nick Denton on Thursday afternoon.

In the original offer from Ziff-Davis that Gawker announced when it filed for bankruptcy, it looked as though a window had been left open that might have allowed Denton take over ownership of the main site, but that window appears to have closed. The Univision offer reportedly includes a clause that prevents him from competing with the new owner of his former company.

Univision hasn’t disclosed why it didn’t want to acquire Gawker.com, but it’s likely the reputation of the site (not to mention a conspicuous lack of advertising on that particular vertical) convinced the company not to include it in the deal.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017